Slashdot Mirror
Ask Slashdot: Should CPU, GPU Name-Numbering Indicate Real World Performance?
dryriver writes: Anyone who has built a PC in recent years knows how confusing the letters and numbers that trail modern CPU and GPU names can be because they do not necessarily tell you how fast one electronic part is compared to another electronic part. A Zoomdaahl Core C-5 7780 is not necessarily faster than a Boomberg ElectronRipper V-6 6220 -- the number at the end, unlike a GFLOPS or TFLOPS number for example, tells you very little about the real-world performance of the part. It is not easy to create one unified, standardized performance benchmark that could change this. One part may be great for 3D gaming, a competing part may smoke the first part in a database server application, and a third part may compress 4K HEVC video 11% faster. So creating something like, say, a Standardized Real-World Application Performance Score (SRWAPS) and putting that score next to the part name, letters, or series number will probably never happen. A lot of competing companies would have to agree to a particular type of benchmark, make sure all benchmarking is done fairly and accurately, and so on and so forth.
But how are the average consumers just trying to buy the right home laptop or gaming PC for their kids supposed to cope with the "letters and numbers salad" that follows CPU, GPU and other computer part names? If you are computer literate, you can dive right into the different performance benchmarks for a certain part on a typical tech site that benchmarks parts. But what if you are "Computer Buyer Joe" or "Jane Average" and you just want to glean quickly which two products -- two budget priced laptops listed on Amazon.com for example -- have the better performance overall? Is there no way to create some kind of rough numeric indicator of real-world performance and put it into a product's specs for quick comparison?
But how are the average consumers just trying to buy the right home laptop or gaming PC for their kids supposed to cope with the "letters and numbers salad" that follows CPU, GPU and other computer part names? If you are computer literate, you can dive right into the different performance benchmarks for a certain part on a typical tech site that benchmarks parts. But what if you are "Computer Buyer Joe" or "Jane Average" and you just want to glean quickly which two products -- two budget priced laptops listed on Amazon.com for example -- have the better performance overall? Is there no way to create some kind of rough numeric indicator of real-world performance and put it into a product's specs for quick comparison?
I don't think the name needs to denote real performance numbers. However, it ABSOLUTELY SHOULD denote different products which HAVE PERFORMANCE DIFFERENCES! Case and point, AMD first released a RX560 which was benchmarked and reviewed by all the media/press which used 1024 Stream Processors and 16 compute units. A few weeks/months later, AMD quietly released a new version, still calling it the RX560 (with no other indication of a change and no announcement of a change), and instead having 896 Stream Processors and 14 compute units. Nothing indicates the difference between the two versions, but one version is absolutely less powerful than the other. Nvidia is now essentially doing a similar thing with the MX150, releasing a new version that uses less power, and runs with a 36% slower base clock speed, 32% slower boost clock speed, and 17% slower memory clock speed. Benchmarks are showing it having about a 20-25% slower performance as a result. Yet, it is still called MX150, and will be advertised as such when people go and look at the part.
In both these cases, they should be clearly renamed a different product, denoting the actual product, which you can then get clear idea of the performance of the product based on reviews and benchmarks.