cpu vs gpu vs ram on Hacker News

Across 2007–2026 of Hacker News, cpu leads cpu vs gpu vs ram with 177,994 mentions to ram’s 124,807, peaking in Nov 2020.

Mention-over-time for cpu vs gpu vs ram, overlaid across 2007–2026 of Hacker News. Each line is a live date-histogram over ~45M posts and comments, computed with Upstash Redis Search.

cpu177,994 mentions, peak Nov 2020gpu103,365 mentions, peak Aug 2022ram124,807 mentions, peak Mar 2026

Open this comparison in the interactive tool — zoom to any date range and read the stories behind each spike →

How the lead changed hands

The eternal hardware trio: CPU and RAM are the staples HN has argued about since 2007, while GPU climbs out of the pack through the crypto-mining and deep-learning booms.

The stories behind each line

Top “cpu” stories

24-core CPU and I can’t move my mouse 1,011 points · 2017
Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model 1,003 points · 2025
Performance and telemetry analysis of Trae IDE, ByteDance's VSCode fork 954 points · 2025
VS Code uses 13% CPU when idle due to blinking cursor rendering 899 points · 2017

Top “gpu” stories

Nvidia releases open-source GPU kernel modules 2,410 points · 2022
Show HN: Alacritty, a GPU-accelerated terminal emulator written in Rust 1,170 points · 2017
Run Stable Diffusion on Your M1 Mac’s GPU 1,007 points · 2022
Show HN: Kitten TTS – 25MB CPU-Only, Open-Source TTS Model 1,003 points · 2025

Top “ram” stories

I designed a Dieter Rams-inspired iPhone dock 1,509 points · 2024
Performance and telemetry analysis of Trae IDE, ByteDance's VSCode fork 954 points · 2025
How Naughty Dog Fit Crash Bandicoot into 2MB of RAM on the PS1 934 points · 2015
Adventures of putting 16 GB of RAM in a motherboard that doesn’t support it 817 points · 2019

Each term on its own

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