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10 Years of Intel Processors Compared
jjslash writes to Techspot's interesting look back at the evolution of Intel CPUs since the original Core 2 Duo E6600 and Core 2 Quad processors were introduced. The test pits the eight-year-old CPUs against their successors in the Nehalem, Sandy Bridge and Haswell families, including today's Celeron and Pentium parts which fare comparably well. A great reference just days before Intel's new Skylake processor debuts.
I was hoping to see an article discussing the changes in architecture and how the improvements have been made, not just regurgiting lists of bench marks
If you buy a highend Haswell CPU, they're faster than the first generation by enough to make it matter. Anything newer and you're actually slowing down. Intel's new strategy is to make slower CPUs with faster graphics and lower power consumption.
One thing I found when speccing a new computer was single thread performance. Properly designed intense workloads will multithread (even video encoding), but for day to day use, it's usually one thread that's bogging down the system. AMD in particular pushes for multithread performance at the expense of single thread performance. For Intel, i7 Haswell chips do great at multithreading, but only slightly better at single threaded performance than i5 Haswells, for substantially more cost. Since I don't game, I went with a higher end i5.