4 ms·

People repeat that meme that SandyBridge doesn't need replaced so often. You say it 2 or 3 times by yourself. While that's the prevailing opinion, I don't nece

People repeat that meme that SandyBridge doesn't need replaced so often. You say it 2 or 3 times by yourself. While that's the prevailing opinion, I don't necessarily agree. I think it's SandyBridge owners trying to convince themselves more than anything else, but really it's just being swooped up in the groupthink. Skylake is the first chip that makes a very strong case as an upgrade. You gain NVME support for your PCIE SSDs, DDR4 (which has shown an improvement over DDR3 in some benchmarks), roughly 20% IPC improvement (5% per gen give or take), DX12_1 feature level IGP, CPUs with 128MB L4 cache which absolutely destroys chips that didn't have this for gaming (Broadwell had it first and Skylake's is improved upon), vastly more power efficient and Thunderbolt3 support. 7 pretty good reasons off the top of my head. You can dismiss each of these if you want, but this is all very attractive in reality. The whole story is that SandyBridge is only competitive, in gaming, if you overclock to 4Ghz+. You still lose out on the other improvements though and any stock SB system compared to a stock SL system will look pretty sad once you factor in the platform updates. If it's gaming you care about, take a look at the benchmarks of the 128MB L4 Broadwell chips compared to Devil's Canyon. Let alone SandyBridge. Both get crushed where it counts and Intel is just now getting Skylake 128MB L4 CPUs out the door. If you don't care about gaming, Skylake still crushes SB.

dragontamer 11y ago
> Skylake is the first chip that makes a very strong case as an upgrade. You gain NVME support for your PCIE SSDs http://www.amazon.com/Ableconn-PEXM2-SSD-NGFF-Express-Adapter/dp/B017JGVTAM http://www.amazon.com/Ableconn-PEXM2-SSD-NGFF-Express-Adapte... If you care about NVMe, just get a $20 expansion card. Besides, NVMe SSDs are expensive. Mushkin Reactor 1TB for $210 yo. Hell, the fastest NVMe SSDs directly go into PCIe lanes. So if I actually cared about the faster speeds, I'd jump to an Intel 750 SSD. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167359 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167... Name me an M.2 NVMe SSD that is more cost effective than a Mushkin Reactor (1TB, MLC, maxes out the SATA6gbps bus, $200), or has faster I/O speeds than a 750. Yes, if I had a laptop which only had room for a M.2 card, then maybe I'd get the Samsung M.2 card. But even if one were given to me for free, I'd rather get the $20 PCIe expansion card. I can't think of a single situation where I actually need the onboard M.2 card on the Skylake motherboards, aside from the $20 convenience. > roughly 20% IPC improvement (5% per gen give or take) I admit, this is a good thing. But this is very very little, especially when you consider that the iPhone 5 to iPhone6 jump was 70% IPC improvement AND battery improvement, yet many people don't consider that enough of a jump. http://www.imore.com/a9-processor-iphone-6s-and-6s-plus-70-faster-a8-chip http://www.imore.com/a9-processor-iphone-6s-and-6s-plus-70-f... Soooo... FIVE years gets you +20% speed, while ONE year gets you +70% speed on phones. That's why desktops aren't getting upgraded. > DX12_1 feature level IGP You buy a $300+ CPU without buying a $100 GPU? The cheapest of GPUs are significantly better than IGP. Hell, if I cared about DX12_1 IGP, I'd get an AMD A10 for half the cost and twice the IGP performance with drivers that actually work on games. Except I game in capacities that far exceed even AMD's superior IGP. I also care about adaptive sync / GSync technology, which isn't supported by Intel Iris. So I have a R9 290X. Intel's IGP doesn't even come close to a $100 GPU, let alone the midrange GPUs. > CPUs with 128MB L4 cache which absolutely destroys chips that didn't have this for gaming NOT on the desktop. Crystalwell is laptop-only, and 45W to boot. Compared to 20W Laptop chips, I don't see the Crystalwell L4 Cache actually being useful to the majority of people. In fact, I don't even know of any laptops with Crystalwell that I'd recommend to anyone. Here's a challenge: Name me a good laptop with Iris Pro / Crystalwell. Hint: Macbook Pro use AMD dGPUs for a reason. And hell, we aren't even talking about laptops. We're talking about Desktops, and Crystalwell is UNAVAILABLE in desktop form. Its irrelevant to the desktop user, even if you thought that paying $600+ for a CPU was cost-effective (instead of buying a Sandy Bridge E5-2670 for $70 from Amazon). Basically, you got DDR4 RAM and IPC +20%. That's all that I actually think the last five years will get you. Or, you can buy a 8-core 16-thread E5-2670 for $70... hell... two of them, get a nice Server Board for $300 and have a BEAST of a machine. http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/ http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/
- ericd 11y ago
  The base Macbook Pro 15" uses Crystalwell and has no dGPU.
  - deleted 11y ago
    [deleted]
  - dragontamer 11y ago
    Yeah, but would you seriously recommend it over the AMD Tonga (R9 M370X on the upscaled version)? The 45W i7 is a heavy burden to carry with Crystalwell. Might as well get better graphics if you're going for the 15" Pro.
    - BuckRogers 11y ago
      There is no way in hell I would prefer that AMD chip in my system over an all-Intel system. AMD are just terrible to use in Linux and most people around here want the ability to run that natively without issue. Not to mention the added complication of tacking that AMD chip onto the laptop both from an engineering / reliability stance and software complication. You missed the irony of your 45watts as a heavy burden. A R9 370X adds about 50watts to your TDP by itself. Along with its needless complexity. If someone wanted to reduce TDP and that complexity you could step down to the base Intel IGP. But if stepping up, Intel's solution makes a lot more sense.
      - dragontamer 11y ago
        Your loss man. The benchmarks don't lie. Good luck with your overpriced Crystalwell failure. If you got actual benchmark scores to talk about, please respond to me here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536519 But I actually know the benchmarks of everything you're talking about like the back of my hand. Your argument has no technical legs to stand on what-so-ever. Don't feel bad if I'm just calling out your Bull$.
        11y ago

dragontamer 11y ago

> Skylake is the first chip that makes a very strong case as an upgrade. You gain NVME support for your PCIE SSDs http://www.amazon.com/Ableconn-PEXM2-SSD-NGFF-Express-Adapter/dp/B017JGVTAM http://www.amazon.com/Ableconn-PEXM2-SSD-NGFF-Express-Adapte... If you care about NVMe, just get a $20 expansion card. Besides, NVMe SSDs are expensive. Mushkin Reactor 1TB for $210 yo. Hell, the fastest NVMe SSDs directly go into PCIe lanes. So if I actually cared about the faster speeds, I'd jump to an Intel 750 SSD. http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167359 http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820167... Name me an M.2 NVMe SSD that is more cost effective than a Mushkin Reactor (1TB, MLC, maxes out the SATA6gbps bus, $200), or has faster I/O speeds than a 750. Yes, if I had a laptop which only had room for a M.2 card, then maybe I'd get the Samsung M.2 card. But even if one were given to me for free, I'd rather get the $20 PCIe expansion card. I can't think of a single situation where I actually need the onboard M.2 card on the Skylake motherboards, aside from the $20 convenience. > roughly 20% IPC improvement (5% per gen give or take) I admit, this is a good thing. But this is very very little, especially when you consider that the iPhone 5 to iPhone6 jump was 70% IPC improvement AND battery improvement, yet many people don't consider that enough of a jump. http://www.imore.com/a9-processor-iphone-6s-and-6s-plus-70-faster-a8-chip http://www.imore.com/a9-processor-iphone-6s-and-6s-plus-70-f... Soooo... FIVE years gets you +20% speed, while ONE year gets you +70% speed on phones. That's why desktops aren't getting upgraded. > DX12_1 feature level IGP You buy a $300+ CPU without buying a $100 GPU? The cheapest of GPUs are significantly better than IGP. Hell, if I cared about DX12_1 IGP, I'd get an AMD A10 for half the cost and twice the IGP performance with drivers that actually work on games. Except I game in capacities that far exceed even AMD's superior IGP. I also care about adaptive sync / GSync technology, which isn't supported by Intel Iris. So I have a R9 290X. Intel's IGP doesn't even come close to a $100 GPU, let alone the midrange GPUs. > CPUs with 128MB L4 cache which absolutely destroys chips that didn't have this for gaming NOT on the desktop. Crystalwell is laptop-only, and 45W to boot. Compared to 20W Laptop chips, I don't see the Crystalwell L4 Cache actually being useful to the majority of people. In fact, I don't even know of any laptops with Crystalwell that I'd recommend to anyone. Here's a challenge: Name me a good laptop with Iris Pro / Crystalwell. Hint: Macbook Pro use AMD dGPUs for a reason. And hell, we aren't even talking about laptops. We're talking about Desktops, and Crystalwell is UNAVAILABLE in desktop form. Its irrelevant to the desktop user, even if you thought that paying $600+ for a CPU was cost-effective (instead of buying a Sandy Bridge E5-2670 for $70 from Amazon). Basically, you got DDR4 RAM and IPC +20%. That's all that I actually think the last five years will get you. Or, you can buy a 8-core 16-thread E5-2670 for $70... hell... two of them, get a nice Server Board for $300 and have a BEAST of a machine. http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/ http://www.techspot.com/review/1155-affordable-dual-xeon-pc/

ericd 11y ago
The base Macbook Pro 15" uses Crystalwell and has no dGPU.
- deleted 11y ago
  [deleted]
- dragontamer 11y ago
  Yeah, but would you seriously recommend it over the AMD Tonga (R9 M370X on the upscaled version)? The 45W i7 is a heavy burden to carry with Crystalwell. Might as well get better graphics if you're going for the 15" Pro.
  - BuckRogers 11y ago
    There is no way in hell I would prefer that AMD chip in my system over an all-Intel system. AMD are just terrible to use in Linux and most people around here want the ability to run that natively without issue. Not to mention the added complication of tacking that AMD chip onto the laptop both from an engineering / reliability stance and software complication. You missed the irony of your 45watts as a heavy burden. A R9 370X adds about 50watts to your TDP by itself. Along with its needless complexity. If someone wanted to reduce TDP and that complexity you could step down to the base Intel IGP. But if stepping up, Intel's solution makes a lot more sense.
    - dragontamer 11y ago
      Your loss man. The benchmarks don't lie. Good luck with your overpriced Crystalwell failure. If you got actual benchmark scores to talk about, please respond to me here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536519 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11536519 But I actually know the benchmarks of everything you're talking about like the back of my hand. Your argument has no technical legs to stand on what-so-ever. Don't feel bad if I'm just calling out your Bull$.
      - 11y ago