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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 wish they also made benchmarks that only use a common base instruction set (SSE2/3), because most of the newer processor superiority probably comes from ISA extensions.
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
Not only that, but most people talk about "speed" when they use their computer mainly as a terminal for the WWW. They would probably receive more benefit and apparent "speed" from upgrading their internet speed package instead of buying a faster machine.
Seven puppies were harmed during the making of this post.
What's an i7? I'm still using the C2Q 6600 in my main desktop. It does just fine even in modern games, although I am planning to finally upgrade once Skylake CPUs our available.
They change the order of the processors in the graphs so it's hard to tell one from another, and they divided the page up into a bunch of tiny little pieces. Why?
That's
like
putting
each
word
on
separate
lines.
Are they mentally challenged?
increase in single thread performance:
1994 to 2004: x100
2005 to 2015: x3
bla.. bla... GPUs...
You would think by now Intel would have fixed the design flaws in the memory management unit (MMU) ..
"So we compared 8 years of Intel processors....."
sigh
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.
Ancient? I've got a Pentium D 805 running as a general family use machine and a Pentium III running as a file server. I just got rid of a bunch of Pentium (as in the original) boards year. I have an 8080 I pulled from an old board, framed, hanging in my workshop. Now get off my lawn.
They got better because they improved the ISA. That's why you want a new one. Taking that out would be basically saying "let's take away all the new features that were added and see if it's as good." The answer wouldn't be very interesting.
Well crappy Javascript code (as is prevalent on the web today) is pretty power hungry, but it's terrible everywhere anyway.
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.
You've never used the "new and improved" Google Maps interface have you?
It's just like the old one, but 10x slower.
Right with you on a C2Q-6600 that's been running at 3ghz since the day it was first booted. You and I also share the same reason for upgrading - virtualization; although mine isn't as much for performance as it is for memory. I can only buy 8GB of ram for my current machine (DDR2) and would like more.
Karnal
You mean binary blob skylake? No thanks. I'm trying to stay away from the new DRM-friendly Intel processors.
It's either done using GPUs, or dedicated cards from BlackMagic or Matrox, or explicit encoding hardware boxes. Also, the nightly news doesn't usually air in 4K.
4K h.265 encoding at 2 frames per second on the fastest CPU. And I thought I had a memory channel bottleneck.
Video encoding is insanely slow! How do TV stations handle moving editing and encoding their video. It seems that the evening news wouldn't be feasible at these encoding rates.
High end hardware, professional software that takes advantage of the GPU and custom hardware encoders. Plus, the editing is normally done on uncompressed video.
Not to mention things like animation/effects and encoding are often done on a render farm of dedicated servers.
So lets pretend that we've just completed writing this code, as opposed to having just completed sabotaging it -Altera
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.
Waterfox - a Firefox fork with legacy extension support, security updates and better privacy by default.
I'm still running the bottom-of-the-barrel CPU used in their list. Mid-2010 Mac mini, Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz E6600.
Get free satoshi (Bitcoin) and Dogecoins
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.
Hell, I'm still using a Crusoe C2D in my primary desktop at home. With a decent video card, 4GB RAM and a SSD, it's just fine for most everything that isn't super high end simulation and gaming.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
I haven't purchased a new desktop CPU in at least that long. I know we have great new stuff out there but I just haven't seen anything come in for some time that justifies the cost when my existing stuff still works for what I do.
Damn_registrars has no butt-hole. Damn_registrars has no use for a butt-hole.
I have an 8008 in a piece of equipment I could go in the other room and turn on. And 3 or 4 full tubes of Harris (Intersil clone) 6100s if I want to run the PDP-8 instruction set. My Kaypro has an 8080 in it, and isn't just a gutted part either.
You're welcome to mow my lawn if you're just going to stand there.
For most X58 motherboards, all that's likely to berequired is a BIOS upgrade. If you could get 3.8 to 4.0 GHz on air on an i7-920, you can easily get 4.0-4.4 GHz on the Xeons.
Best part is that the upgrade is literally a drop-in replacement. No software reconfiguration required.
Plenty of 6 core Xeon X5650 boxes one eBay for a fraction of their retail.
I wish they had included Xeons, even though they're considered "server" processors rather than desktop.
I was running an i5-2500k overclocked on my mobo, and was looking at upgrading to an i7-3770k to get virtualization and hyperthreading, but it would have cost me well over $300.
Instead, I found a deal on a Xeon E3-1245v2 for $219 and I'm very happy with it. Runs at 77W instead of 95W too.
Stop replying to trolls.
Processors ought to have a minimum of twice the number of cores by now. Intel could at least have the decency to offer the option of trading a GPU for more cores.
(Yes, there are outrageously expensive server parts with more cores...)
They do. The only Intel "consumer" chips without a GPU are the 6-core EXTREME(!!!) edition.
I was surprised by how 'flat' the performance increases are as well. If you interpret Moore's Law as expecting a doubling of performance ever 18 months (yes I know this wasn't what Moore's Law originally said, but for long time the transistor count on a die and performance ran hand in hand), 8 years gives time for 5.333 doublings. 2^5.333 is about 40.3. That is a big difference from the 'up to 11 times faster' results these benchmarks produced. If you're more lenient and allow for 2 years between expected performance doublings, the current processors should still be 16 times faster than those from 8 years earlier.
RETURN without GOSUB in line 1050
Not on the AMD side as far as "bang for the buck" is concerned. In 2007 I paid $140 for a quad core CPU and last month I paid $132 for an octocore. Blows through transcodes like a boss and at $362 for the processor AND a gamer board AND 16GB of RAM? Its still got the bang for the buck like they did in 07.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
A much better comparison would have been if they'd compared the same CPUs at the same frequency so that IPC gains could be immediately spotted. Also I've never understood the point of all-in-one benchmarks like PCMark which measure everything and nothing because various PCs with wildly different CPUs/GPUs/RAM configurations have very similar results.
You can also add controller cards. PCIe 4x 2.0 card - goes in either 4x slot or 16x slot - has 2GB/s to play with, which is enough for the newer stuff.
Cheap PCIe 1x 2.0 card with an ASMedia SATA 6 Gbps controller (two ports) is good enough, even if the bus limits it to a theoretical 500MB/s.
I believe editing is done with compressed video, but it's compressed frame by frame. The old MJPEG was used for this in the 90s, then it's a mode in MPEG-4 video, H264 and H265.
For fun I've considered 4096x2160 video at 60 fps, encoded in RGB with 12 bits per pixel. (however unlikely using RGB might be)
That's 2278 MiB per second of video, camera wouldn't even be able to write that to its storage.
The eXXXtreme is at eight cores now.
You missed the part about minimum; it is meaningless if Intel offers some hideously expensive outlier part. Granted, there are some six core variants which cost less, but they are still expensive 130-140W LGA2011 parts. The mainstream is still stuck squarely with 2-4 cores. Two cores in 2015 is pitiful.
That's nothing, I have these pipes http://www.wanamakerorgan.com/... waiting for me to play, and that's only in house.
To respect my lawn full light you best start mowing now, dim sum.
Ancient?! I just went from a ca. 2006 2Ghz Core2Duo to a 1.7Ghz i3 a few months back. I don't game or do anything particularly CPU-intensive, so I wasn't expecting big changes, but DAMN! I had no idea. I think the drastically improved memory bandwidth really shows, particularly in Chrome. These are both 4GB machines with an SSD too. Anyway, the i3 was really excellent bang/buck. No regrets.
You've been waiting "a couple of years" to upgrade a CPU that is less then four years old? Just how long after buying it did you decide to upgrade?
Ezekiel 23:20
Deliberately bottlenecking the hell out of the older Dual cores with a GTX 980 and 4GB RAM?
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Well, you can't get worse than me.... finally got around to upgrading the CPU in the ...15 year old box. Doubled its performance! :)
~REZ~ #43301. Who'd fake being me anyway?