Intel: Chips Will Have to Sacrifice Speed Gains for Energy Savings

Excellent points and I agree 100% that latency issues greatly impact what we actually experience viewing webpages. But ISPs have more control than I feel you are giving them credit for (with the total understanding you said, "beyond a certain point"). While latency is not totally dependent on bandwidth, bandwidth can sure be a contributing factor to latency issues as seen from a user's computer.

ISPs have no control over the website's host, or from the website's host to the host's PoP. And they have no control over latency occurring over the big Internet backbone pipes (such as between hops). Put the ISP does have a lot (not total, but a lot) of control between the big backbones and their own PoP, and from the PoP to your home - as does the user in many cases. ISPs can put bigger/faster pipes out to your neighborhood. Users can (if available in their area) opt for fiber over copper, or a fast cable over a slow DSL. ISPs can pay for bigger pipes from their PoP out.

But of course, all this costs money - in some cases, lots of money!

I agree. But not only that, many popular webpages (or parts of those webpages) are cached on local servers so they don't have to be requested from the host again. For example, common "objects" from Amazon. Google does this all the time with full pages to speed up search hits.

But again, the point is, network performance is but one "potential" bottleneck that can affect the performance (or maybe saying "perceived" performance would be better) of a computer. But since not all tasks are network related, it certainly is not the only potential bottleneck that has absolutely nothing to do with the CPU's ability.

 

I will try to take away some of your confusion:

Yes, I did said "CPU speed is not that important". I should have added: unless you're running some old skool CPU. Current CPU's like the Intel Core i5 and i7 are fast enough for my taste. I also said that sometimes "browsers/CPU's struggle to load sites smoothly". I should have added: It's mostly up to browser developers and web developers to tackle this problem, before we should call for more speedy CPU's.

I never denied that, I said it's not relevant in this thread. A 10 year old knows that network speed is always a factor when it comes to loading websites. But I'm talking about browser performance. This depends on both the quality of the browser engine and CPU speed, that why it's relevant in this thread.

 

I never said that browsers are poorly programmed, I'm actually impressed with the speed of browsers like Chrome and Vivaldi, but I haven't seen any improvement in Firefox. So in this case you could say that Firefox doesn't need a faster CPU, it needs a better engine.

Of course web-developers also play a role, the less bloat the better. There are certain sites that are so full of first and third party scripts that even the fastest browser on a high end CPU will have difficulties to load it smoothly. But we got scriptblockers to take care of that.

To clarify (before Bill gets confused again), when I say "smoothly" this is not related to network speed. You can clearly see CPU usage going up, because it has to process all of those scripts (and other stuff), which oftens leads to slower rendering and a slightly less responsive browser. It might take only 1 or 2 seconds longer to load the website itself, but to me it's still annoying.