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.

Comments

Re:Different instruction sets

[goarilla]

I wish they compared early PIII Katmai or Coppermines to the Duo 6600. Because what the pessimist in me is seeing, isn't a cherrypicked 11 x increase in one bench but overall core performance stagnation.

Re:My ancient i7-2700

[Anonymous Coward]

That's not just about the pace of change, it's about how well the machines handled the typical workloads of the day. In 1995, mainstream PCs struggled with the typical workloads of the day; my first laptop was a 100MHz Pentium with 8MB of RAM bought around then, and it was slow just booting up, getting online, word processing etc, even after I upgraded it to a massive 24MB of RAM. So any real-terms performance increase made a huge impact in terms of your day-to-day experience using the machines.

Whereas in recent years, even a low-end machine isn't taxed by basic workloads, so the performance improvments don't really have much impact on your day-to-day experience. I can go from my 16GB i7 work laptop to my 4GB i3 ultrabook, and I'll only really notice a performance difference if I wanted to do something like encoding video or whatever.

4 years, almost no change.

[MrL0G1C]

What strikes me the most is that today's processors are barely any faster than the 2011 processors.

4 years and only a small speed increase in real performance - 4% for games!!!!! FOUR PERCENT over 4 years. Time to ditch silicon and to start using materials that support higher clock speeds.