On a PC environment when you've got multiple browser windows open, IRC, email client, etc. getting constrained for IOPS is easier than expected.
An off-the-shelf SATA 840 EVO SDD hits 98,000 read IOPS, and all those tasks you mention added together wouldn't hit more than 1% of that. They're the very definition of network bound operations. The average email in my IMAP spool right now is 43KB and would take 11 4KB operations to completely read from or write to storage. Browsers site there idle 99.9% of the time. IRC? Not that I've ever seen.
Do it in a real world environment, and I'm willing to bet PCIe will show it's worth. I don't think that games will run any faster than the baseline results of no load, but I'm willing to guess it'll do better than the SATA equivalents.
I haven't bothered to look at their methodology but I tentatively agree with their conclusion: almost no desktop users would be able to tell the difference. I mean, even a HDD benching at 103 read IOPS seems spritely for most use cases. A SATA SSD working 950 times faster is as close to instantaneous as most desktop uses could ever hope for.
A guy named Amdahl had something to say on the subject. SSDs excel at IOPS, but that buys you little if you're not IOPS-constrained.
Examples of things that eat operations as fast as you can throw them at 'em: databases, compilation, most server daemons.
Examples of things that couldn't care less: streaming large assets that are decompressed in realtime, like audio or video files. Loading a word processing document. Downloading a game patch. Encoding a DVD. Playing RAM-resident video games.
It should be a shock to roughly no one that buffing an underused part won't make the whole system faster. I couldn't mow my lawn any faster if the push mower had a big block V8, nor would overclocking my laptop make it show movies any faster.
TL;DR non-IO-bound things don't benefit from more IO.
There is some debate on this, supported by observations.
I remember when the Death Penalty was reinstated in the US.
The proponents, in the popular media, said that it was necessary for the drug war - and would only be used in extreme cases, for Drug Kingpins, and Serial Killers, where there was no doubt about guilt, because there was overwhelming evidence, and full confession.
As it turns out - this was absolutely not the case.
...unless you're a smoker and have highly depressed CO2 overload sensations due to your constant saturation.
Does it mean VisualStudio will run on Linux soon?
No. Visual Studio is not open source (although there is now a free Community edition), and "open source" doesn't mean "runs on Linux" anyway.
FWIW, I think those are perfectly plausible explanations. I mainly meant wanted to frame the GP's own opinion as a formal test case; that's a copy-and-paste of what he wrote.
If your charity is providing shelter for the homeless, but they have to pay 10 bucks per night for the bunk-bed, you are not non-profit.
That test fails. What if it costs $50 per night for the bunk-bed and the rest is subsidized through external donations?
If your mega-church is providing "healing for the sick", but they have to pay $200 to enter, you are not a non-profit.
And if that $200 turns into renting clinic space and buying supplies to provide free medical care to poor children?
My point is that the answer to these questions is never simple, and if you think you've found a simple definition that neatly covers everything, it suggests you're likely missing something.
1 + 1 = 3, for large values of 1.
