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> Based on just "3GHz core i7", a chip could either be painfully out of date or current top of the line. This has always bothered me too. I suspect that the a
by nerflad 10y ago
> Based on just "3GHz core i7", a chip could either be painfully out of date or current top of the line.
This has always bothered me too. I suspect that the ambiguity is intentional on the part of Intel and/or Apple marketing (though I'm not savvy enough to know why exactly).
- exergy 10y agoLinus mentions it in one of his videos. The idea is that Intel doesn't want you worried about the generation, only whether it's i3/i5/i7. I guess this helps them mask over the fact that, year on year, CPUs aren't really getting any faster in single-threaded performance.
- blhack 10y agoLinus Torvalds?
- chipperyman573 10y agoProbably Linus Tech Tips, the YouTuber
- MiddleEndian 10y agoThere's some YouTube tech review guy whose name is Linus.
- stefantalpalaru 10y agoNo, it's a famous youtuber specializing in hardware news/reviews: https://www.youtube.com/user/LinusTechTips https://www.youtube.com/user/LinusTechTips
- plussed_reader 10y agoNo, Linus van Pelt.
- y2kenny 10y agoLinus Sebastian
- vehementi 10y agoSibling poster stefantalpalaru you appear to be hell banned
- tingol 10y agoHow does that makes sense? Isn't it beneficial to Intel that you WANT the latest gen regardless of how little it progressed from the previous gen?
- IshKebab 10y agoYes, and they way they do that is by obscuring the performance and hoping you'll assume processor speed is still advancing as quickly as it did in the 90s and early 2000s.
- srssays 10y agoLaptops are much more expensive than CPUs. I'm not likely to buy a whole new laptop just because Intel introduced a new generation. However, if my laptop is old and slow, and I'm already in the market for a new computer, I can easily be convinced to buy the computer with the "bigger numbers". Buying i7 instead of i5 only a small part of the full price, so why not?
- loeg 10y ago> CPUs aren't really getting any faster in single-threaded performance. They are, though slowly. The skylakes are a bit faster than the broadwells are a bit faster than the haswells, etc.
- nerflad 10y agoYeah there's a massive difference between the Haswell i7 (2015) in my workstation at home and the Sandy Bridge i7 (2011) in my workstation at the office. The old CPU's sharing a name with the new CPU's makes them sound like they're still up-to-date. Which I guess is great for making you feel better about your old device? This seems potentially detrimental to sales though, so I still don't understand the impetus for marketing them like that.
- loeg 10y agoYeah, I still have a Nehalem at work and it's nuts how much slower it is than my Haswell at home (which is getting a little old itself).
- majewsky 10y agoBy the same logic, you could complain that VW sells people new Golfs that have nothing to do with the original VW Golf from 1974. It's an entirely usual thing to maintain marketing names between generations because the marketing name is rather a description of the target audience than of the concrete feature set or technical specs.
- pm24601 10y agoWhy is single threaded performance important? When I think about my daily work - it is very multi-threaded: * parallel builds * video running in chrome * a zillion tabs open What I really care about is battery life.
- ianai 10y agoBecause the UI is single threaded, I think. i.e. the actual drawing of a button press or menu call up.
- flukus 10y agoBecause a lot of things still aren't or can't be multi threaded, most notably game engines.
- jeeva 10y agoI think I'd argue that game engines are implementing and running multi-threaded engines a heck of a lot these days - to the extent that if a game _is_ heavily using a single core, you'll see complaints. I would be exceptionally surprised to see any of the higher-budget games running on a single thread. Low-budget indie games less so. Personally, I've found that a good benchmark for "what is happening in most games" is the lowest common denominator - consoles. Having said this, you might be arguing that it's hard to split everything out equally in a game - but it's far more likely that threads are created for the stuff that can be - physics calculations, sound, etc. (the stuff that might have, in the past, be split out to dedicated hardware)
- flukus 10y agoThe latter, from what I understand most engines are multi threaded only in the sense that multiple threads are running stuff, one thread for sound, one thread for simulation etc, and that the graphics processing (still the bottleneck in most games) is still mostly single threaded, at least until it get's to the GPU.
- BorisMelnik 10y agoI wish they'd just start using i73970 or i57600k or whatever, thats what most hardcore users look at anyway