10 ms·

I'm comparing the i7 here to the i7 in my current computer, built in April 2011(!) https://ark.intel.com/compare/186604,52214 https://ark.intel.com/compare/186

I'm comparing the i7 here to the i7 in my current computer, built in April 2011(!) https://ark.intel.com/compare/186604,52214 https://ark.intel.com/compare/186604,52214 Kinda though I would see a lot bigger differences. There was a time in my life when I expected I would have to build a new computer every two years. Weird.

dragontamer 8y ago
The i7-2600k doesn't even have 256-bit busses on the inside. The i7-2600k barely begun to implement AVX (and doesn't even implement AVX2). The i9-9900k is way better. 3x 256-bit execution ports, 64-byte (512-bit) messages going around the Ringbus, DDR4 RAM (double memory bandwidth). The raw clocks ignore the huge advancements in IPC that exist between Sandy Bridge and Coffee Lake. And even then, the 5GHz clock on the i9-9900k makes it completely incomparable to compare the ancient Sandy Bridge with the modern Coffee Lake.
- blihp 8y ago
  If you roll up all of the 'huge advancements' (IPC, clock speed, all of it) over the course of 7 years, that's probably in the neighborhood of what we used to call the 'annual upgrade.' Ancient? Yes. Incomparable? No.
  - dragontamer 8y ago
    The Pentium 4 Netburst architecture was relatively stagnant between the years 2000 and 2004. "Prescott" (2004) was still "Netburst" but Prescott includes AMD64 so I'd say that's a major change. Still, its reflective in the naming. Netburst, Willamette, Northwood, Prescott, and Tejas were all called "Pentium 4", and lasted from a time period from year 2000 to 2006. Sure, there were a few additions: Hyperthreading I guess. But otherwise, the main difference in this timeframe were the 250nm to 90nm scaling (which got "free" GHz upgrades back then without any effort) In short: > what we used to call the 'annual upgrade.' You're exaggerating. Progress has slowed but Willamette (year 2000 1.5GHz) vs Northwood (year 2002 2GHz) Pentium 4s weren't that dissimilar. Prescott (2004) is even more amusing, as it hit 3.8GHz (Intel Pentium 4 570J). But boy, oh boy... you really can't compare Prescott 3.8GHz against Sandy Bridge (2011, 3.6GHz) or Coffee Lake (2018, 3.6GHz ), even if the base clocks are all close.
    - blihp 8y ago
      And luckily we had AMD then, as we do now (only recently), to pick up the slack. Sure I'm exaggerating a bit, but no more than you are to say 'incomparable'. Intel upgrades for the last 7 years have been modest at best. If you need a new machine, sure they'll make a fine replacement. But hardly a reason to upgrade year over year (or even every 2-3 years) for performance and/or functionality alone. I've been sitting on an old i7 Sandy Bridge precisely because Intel hasn't been offering me a compelling reason to upgrade. I'm probably going to finally do it next year... but it won't be to another Intel system.
      - tracker1 8y ago
        My 5yo i7-4790K is to this day very fast (gtx 1080, and nvme 2 years ago). May upgrade next year for more threads/vms though.
    - ksec 8y ago
      1. Sandy Bridge to Skylake combined makes barely a double digit gain in IPC, ~roughly 14%. I hardly called that a "huge advancements" in IPC over 7 years time. 2. We have already proved should the SandyBridge Overclocked to 4GHz+ it would have perform faster in some cases than Skylake Uarch with same Clock Speed. Remember SandyBridge was 32nm. 3. "Netburst, Willamette, Northwood, Prescott, and Tejas " You made it sounds as if there were many generation. All of them are part of Netburst uArch and Willamette was the first Gen, Tejas was cancelled. So there is only "Willamette, Northwood, Prescott". Each with much improved Clock speed, better implementation of HT, better memory controller and cache read improvement, and finally AMD64, all translate to substantial performance improvement, regardless of its power usage. Netburst may not be a good uArch, but it definitely brings many improvement, the writing was on the wall in 2004 and we got Core 2 in 2006. And we have been stuck with Quad Core Desktop CPU despite we have had over 4x transistor density improvement.
- coldtea 8y ago
  >The i9-9900k is way better. 3x 256-bit execution ports, 64-byte (512-bit) messages going around the Ringbus, DDR4 RAM (double memory bandwidth). All those don't matter if they hardly make a 10-15% difference in everyday use, and require specialized code to take advantage of.
  - celrod 8y ago
    Much of what I do is vectorized, so the more fma units and the side wider, the faster. So avx512 > avx2 with two 256 bit units > avx2 with two 128 bit units. But my work (statistics) seems poorly represented in benchmarks and the community at large. Ryzen is in the later group, and gets rave reviews. While most press I've seen talking about avx512 has been negative. Yet I get a lot more flops out of the 10-core i9 7900x than the similarly priced 16-core Threadripper 1950x in simulations. A big part of that is probably doing most of my work in Julia, where because the code you run is compiled locally the first time a function/argument type combination is called (a) code will be generated for all your CPU's features, and (b) it is easy to encourage aggressive optimizations to vectorized code by the compiler, eg by parameterizing arrays by their bounds. R benchmarks will not see benefits at all, as much of R's math libraries are terribly unoptimized -- the default BLAS doesn't even use any runtime dispatch! (Thankfully it's easy to change, but the benchmarks all reflect that reality -- and most people's personal experiences too). Similar likely applies to many NumPy benchmarks, but depending on the distributor of those binaries, the situation likely isn't better. Either generic unoptimized binaries, or shipping with something like Intel MKL which, while the fastest linear algebra library for Intel processors, dispatches to slow code paths for AMD processors -- a very unfair choice for benchmarking. I'm less less familiar with NumPy though, so perhaps there's a booth fair and well optimized distribution. I fear the future will move against my use cases.
    - marmaduke 8y ago
      If you want fat vector units you should be on a GPU.
      - dragontamer 8y ago
- mrb 8y ago
  «The i9-9900k is way better...» You forgot the most important: i9-9900k has TWICE the number of cores as i7-2600k.
Brockenstein 8y ago
Well those stats don't really highlight most real-world performance differences. If your expectation is that performance is tied to clock speed and you wanted to see 8 Ghz by now, then sure that's a disappointment, that's not reality though. And besides what we're seeing now and why CPU's are viable for much longer is they got extremely powerful and user demands for more power win general computing kind of tapered off. I mean nowadays you can run multiple programs, a browser with dozens of tabs, multiple other utilities and background task pretty easily. You can run way more stuff then a person can reasonably multi-task. You have to get into some pretty specific workloads to really utilize all the power a modern CPU has and be wanting more. And yeah the performance difference between generations has been pretty meager, but over 5, 6, 7 generations those modest improvements do add up. Going form a 2600k to a 8700k or 9700k is a big leap. But if you're not desperate for a lot more power you just might not care about 50% more performance.
emddudley 8y ago
CPU speed improvements have slowed down compared to the early 00s, but there's still a big difference in performance between 2011 and today. On CPU Benchmark the i7-2600K scores an 8449 [1], while the i7-8700K scores a 15970 [2]. The i7-8700K is the predecessor to the i7-9700K reviewed in the article. [1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2600K+%40+3.40GHz&id=868 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2600K... [2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-8700K+%40+3.70GHz&id=3098 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-8700K...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- user5994461 8y ago
  The real score is 1942 against 2704. Not even a 50% progress in almost a decade. It's disappointing. The score you gave is the multi threaded benchmark that is just higher for having 6 cores rather than 4, that regular applications don't use.
  - cix_pkez 8y ago
    Some do. But in those cases, you might be better served with Ryzen. If you're playing games, you'll get better performance with this i9. But if you're playing games, you're probably not CPU-bound anyway. I'd be interested in what niches people here work in and what CPUs they look for because of their unique needs.
    - leetcrew 8y ago
      the people who care the most about frames per second are playing esports titles that don't demand much from the GPU. counterstrike is still CPU bound in most cases.
      - EugeneOZ 8y ago
        Esport is not about graphics quality at all. Try Assassins Creed - it will eat all of your CPU cores.
overcast 8y ago
Still rocking my LGA1366 Motherboard from 2008 with a Xeon X5675 @ 4.0ghz that I "upgraded" from an I7920 for $90 on ebay , 16GB of RAM, SSD, and an nvidia 1070 as the gaming PC. Handles everything at 2560x1600 60fps+ ultra quality(AA generally not necessary). Really don't quite understand the need to go crazy on computer hardware these days. Upgrading your GPU every 2-3 years seems plenty.
- tinco 8y ago
  I'm rocking the 920 with 6gb still. I have been hesitating to upgrade to the Xeon. I have always been so salty that I jumped in just before the EFI boat, I feel my motherboard is so archaic. Is the performance jump to the Xeon very noticeable?
  - overcast 8y ago
    I think the 920 was fine, but the Xeon granted two more cores, and higher overclocking frequency for me, plus it was only $90. So more future proofing, as games take more advantage of multithreading. Increasing your RAM definitely should be on the list though.
- ragequitta 8y ago
  There is no way sort of some magical overclocking that a 1070 runs everything at 60 fps+ at that res. It has trouble at 1440p with many games. Note the minimum fps (which is the key factor): https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1070-graphics-card-roundup,4751-2.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1070...
  - overcast 8y ago
    I can provide ALL the proof you need on my Asus STRIX 1070. I run everything at 2560x1600 synced to 60fps on my 30" monitor with Ultra settings. Those benchmarks are all enabling AA, which is just wasteful and not required at such resolutions. So yes, with AA, below the 60fps target. But right now my library of 418 Steam games, all run rock solid at those framerates. Metro, Batman, BF1/4/5, Witcher, Alien Isolation, Fallout, GTA, Bioshocks, whatever I throw at it. Though the point of this discussion was the CPU not being critical anymore. If you need more FPS, buy a more expensive video card, not a CPU.
RowanH 8y ago
My Overlocked 6600k vs Ryzen/1800x at stock speeds is night and day difference in "real world" performance. Even though general clock speeds are not that much different - the Ryzen machine is the one I want to use. Desktop productivity improves dramatically with a bunch more cores. Multiple browser tabs, background services, code editors open, VM's open... you can throw a lot of things at the Ryzen machine before you start noticing it starting to slow down. On the 6600 machine it doesn't take much before you notice it chugging.
- nine_k 8y ago
  Is the amount of RAM the same?
  - FractalParadigm 8y ago
    Not the OP but I upgraded from 6600K -> 1800X and honestly they're not even in the same ballpark performance-wise. When you come across software that can take advantage of multiple threads it's not even a contest, the 1800X just walks away laughing. One example I can think of off the top of my head is gaming and transcoding (Plex server) at the same time. Even with QuickSync enabled and running, transcoding HEVC->x264 would regularly stutter and drop frames while a game is running, while also affecting the games framerate. The 1800X (without hardware accelerated video transcoding) just plows through it like it's nothing. I've even had it transcode 10-bit HDR video while playing Forza Horizon 4, not a single loss of framerate in either the game or the video. The extra cores/threads are nothing to scoff at when software can take advantage of them. My upgrade consisted of only the board and CPU; same RAM, GPU, PSU, SSD, etc.
  - RowanH 8y ago
    Same amount of ram, different speeds (2133 vs 3000). I attribute the performance largely to the additional cores... the machine has that processor power sitting ready and waiting.
- tracker1 8y ago
  I'm curious about the amount of memory as well as the drive performance... if you went from 8GB on an HDD to 16+ with an SSD or NVME, huge difference.
xoa 8y ago
Feature differences and bandwidth can still be a significant issue though, and could become more so as raw single thread general CPU performance increases slow down while the surrounding ecosystem continues to improve. More PCIe lanes, more special purpose instructions, more features like ECC and IOMMU support becoming universal standards would all be nice outcomes to see. This could represent a real additional long term opportunity to AMD as well, because historically Intel has been pretty fond of creating profitable product line segmentation via only allowing certain features on certain chips. And they've been mediocre about boosting interconnect capacity as well. Perhaps AMD doesn't necessarily need to match them as well in single thread performance if they can get the absolute difference down to a few percent, but be much friendlier then Intel in terms of not artificially restricting useful extra CPU features? I wonder if that becoming an area of competition again could bring some nice energy back to the market? It's been something that's personally making me reconsider at least. I used to stick to Intel more despite price differences because of their performance advantages, but now I look at the rest of the ecosystem and start to calculate adding a few GPUs, NVMe storage, 10G networking, possibly other accelerator/utility cards and future interconnects, and the PCIe lanes seem to get sucked up a lot faster then they used to. With Ryzen/Epyc AMD is offering a full 64 lanes it looks like vs Intel's 24 here, and even with the latest Xeon I think it's now up to 48 lanes from 32? The difference there isn't nothing if overall system performance starts to depend less on just the CPU then on the overall ability to move data around and keep various more special purpose accelerators fed.
sangaya 8y ago
Check out this benchmark comparison: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-9900K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-2600/4028vs620 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-9900K-vs... It tells you more than the spec sheet comparison.
- kbenson 8y ago
  It's better than indicated in GP, but as an indicator of how good modern CPUs are in comparison to older ones, this page page overstates the case. The older CPU is 4-core but 8-thread (hyperthreads), the newer one is 8-core and 8-thread (no hyperthreads). The multi-core benchmarks are much higher for the newer CPU because it has twice as many cores, so that is inflating the overall score quite a bit. That said, it's not as simple as halving that score, as hyperthreads don't scale quite the same way, so it depends on how the multi-core test is formulated. Edit: Oh, wow, as taspeotis points out it's not even the same two CPUs in the original Intel Ark comparison (which I was working off of from memory when noting cores and threads). The i9-9700k is actually an 8-core and 16-thread (hyperthreads) CPU, so it is actually literally twice as many cores and threads. It's still better performance, but not nearly as lopsided as it even seemed before, given those resources.
- taspeotis 8y ago
  GP said “I'm comparing the i7 here to the i7 in my current computer” and you linked to an i9 vs i7 comparison...
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
- 0-_-0 8y ago
  53% single core clock improvement over almost 8 years. Transistor count has increased from 1B to about 7B, which is roughly in line with Moore's law though...
Quequau 8y ago
I am currently using an early 2008 MacPro and I too had a time in my life when I expected I would have to build a new computer every two years.
wil421 8y ago
I have a Kaby Lake i7 and my last build was a i7-920 (Bloomfield). The old chip is a beast but the power consumption is a lot more. One thing I use is Intel QSV and the intel graphics chip. I don’t need a GPU at this time and it’s nice to have the option.
lotyrin 8y ago
What are you comparing, because 50% more cache and double the memory and PCIe bandwidth is actually a really big deal?

dragontamer 8y ago

The i7-2600k doesn't even have 256-bit busses on the inside. The i7-2600k barely begun to implement AVX (and doesn't even implement AVX2). The i9-9900k is way better. 3x 256-bit execution ports, 64-byte (512-bit) messages going around the Ringbus, DDR4 RAM (double memory bandwidth). The raw clocks ignore the huge advancements in IPC that exist between Sandy Bridge and Coffee Lake. And even then, the 5GHz clock on the i9-9900k makes it completely incomparable to compare the ancient Sandy Bridge with the modern Coffee Lake.

blihp 8y ago
If you roll up all of the 'huge advancements' (IPC, clock speed, all of it) over the course of 7 years, that's probably in the neighborhood of what we used to call the 'annual upgrade.' Ancient? Yes. Incomparable? No.
- dragontamer 8y ago
  The Pentium 4 Netburst architecture was relatively stagnant between the years 2000 and 2004. "Prescott" (2004) was still "Netburst" but Prescott includes AMD64 so I'd say that's a major change. Still, its reflective in the naming. Netburst, Willamette, Northwood, Prescott, and Tejas were all called "Pentium 4", and lasted from a time period from year 2000 to 2006. Sure, there were a few additions: Hyperthreading I guess. But otherwise, the main difference in this timeframe were the 250nm to 90nm scaling (which got "free" GHz upgrades back then without any effort) In short: > what we used to call the 'annual upgrade.' You're exaggerating. Progress has slowed but Willamette (year 2000 1.5GHz) vs Northwood (year 2002 2GHz) Pentium 4s weren't that dissimilar. Prescott (2004) is even more amusing, as it hit 3.8GHz (Intel Pentium 4 570J). But boy, oh boy... you really can't compare Prescott 3.8GHz against Sandy Bridge (2011, 3.6GHz) or Coffee Lake (2018, 3.6GHz ), even if the base clocks are all close.
  - blihp 8y ago
    And luckily we had AMD then, as we do now (only recently), to pick up the slack. Sure I'm exaggerating a bit, but no more than you are to say 'incomparable'. Intel upgrades for the last 7 years have been modest at best. If you need a new machine, sure they'll make a fine replacement. But hardly a reason to upgrade year over year (or even every 2-3 years) for performance and/or functionality alone. I've been sitting on an old i7 Sandy Bridge precisely because Intel hasn't been offering me a compelling reason to upgrade. I'm probably going to finally do it next year... but it won't be to another Intel system.
    - tracker1 8y ago
      My 5yo i7-4790K is to this day very fast (gtx 1080, and nvme 2 years ago). May upgrade next year for more threads/vms though.
  - ksec 8y ago
    1. Sandy Bridge to Skylake combined makes barely a double digit gain in IPC, ~roughly 14%. I hardly called that a "huge advancements" in IPC over 7 years time. 2. We have already proved should the SandyBridge Overclocked to 4GHz+ it would have perform faster in some cases than Skylake Uarch with same Clock Speed. Remember SandyBridge was 32nm. 3. "Netburst, Willamette, Northwood, Prescott, and Tejas " You made it sounds as if there were many generation. All of them are part of Netburst uArch and Willamette was the first Gen, Tejas was cancelled. So there is only "Willamette, Northwood, Prescott". Each with much improved Clock speed, better implementation of HT, better memory controller and cache read improvement, and finally AMD64, all translate to substantial performance improvement, regardless of its power usage. Netburst may not be a good uArch, but it definitely brings many improvement, the writing was on the wall in 2004 and we got Core 2 in 2006. And we have been stuck with Quad Core Desktop CPU despite we have had over 4x transistor density improvement.
coldtea 8y ago
>The i9-9900k is way better. 3x 256-bit execution ports, 64-byte (512-bit) messages going around the Ringbus, DDR4 RAM (double memory bandwidth). All those don't matter if they hardly make a 10-15% difference in everyday use, and require specialized code to take advantage of.
- celrod 8y ago
  Much of what I do is vectorized, so the more fma units and the side wider, the faster. So avx512 > avx2 with two 256 bit units > avx2 with two 128 bit units. But my work (statistics) seems poorly represented in benchmarks and the community at large. Ryzen is in the later group, and gets rave reviews. While most press I've seen talking about avx512 has been negative. Yet I get a lot more flops out of the 10-core i9 7900x than the similarly priced 16-core Threadripper 1950x in simulations. A big part of that is probably doing most of my work in Julia, where because the code you run is compiled locally the first time a function/argument type combination is called (a) code will be generated for all your CPU's features, and (b) it is easy to encourage aggressive optimizations to vectorized code by the compiler, eg by parameterizing arrays by their bounds. R benchmarks will not see benefits at all, as much of R's math libraries are terribly unoptimized -- the default BLAS doesn't even use any runtime dispatch! (Thankfully it's easy to change, but the benchmarks all reflect that reality -- and most people's personal experiences too). Similar likely applies to many NumPy benchmarks, but depending on the distributor of those binaries, the situation likely isn't better. Either generic unoptimized binaries, or shipping with something like Intel MKL which, while the fastest linear algebra library for Intel processors, dispatches to slow code paths for AMD processors -- a very unfair choice for benchmarking. I'm less less familiar with NumPy though, so perhaps there's a booth fair and well optimized distribution. I fear the future will move against my use cases.
  - marmaduke 8y ago
    If you want fat vector units you should be on a GPU.
    - dragontamer 8y ago
mrb 8y ago
«The i9-9900k is way better...» You forgot the most important: i9-9900k has TWICE the number of cores as i7-2600k.

Brockenstein 8y ago

Well those stats don't really highlight most real-world performance differences. If your expectation is that performance is tied to clock speed and you wanted to see 8 Ghz by now, then sure that's a disappointment, that's not reality though. And besides what we're seeing now and why CPU's are viable for much longer is they got extremely powerful and user demands for more power win general computing kind of tapered off. I mean nowadays you can run multiple programs, a browser with dozens of tabs, multiple other utilities and background task pretty easily. You can run way more stuff then a person can reasonably multi-task. You have to get into some pretty specific workloads to really utilize all the power a modern CPU has and be wanting more. And yeah the performance difference between generations has been pretty meager, but over 5, 6, 7 generations those modest improvements do add up. Going form a 2600k to a 8700k or 9700k is a big leap. But if you're not desperate for a lot more power you just might not care about 50% more performance.

emddudley 8y ago

CPU speed improvements have slowed down compared to the early 00s, but there's still a big difference in performance between 2011 and today. On CPU Benchmark the i7-2600K scores an 8449 [1], while the i7-8700K scores a 15970 [2]. The i7-8700K is the predecessor to the i7-9700K reviewed in the article. [1] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2600K+%40+3.40GHz&id=868 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-2600K... [2] https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-8700K+%40+3.70GHz&id=3098 https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-8700K...

deleted 8y ago
[deleted]
user5994461 8y ago
The real score is 1942 against 2704. Not even a 50% progress in almost a decade. It's disappointing. The score you gave is the multi threaded benchmark that is just higher for having 6 cores rather than 4, that regular applications don't use.
- cix_pkez 8y ago
  Some do. But in those cases, you might be better served with Ryzen. If you're playing games, you'll get better performance with this i9. But if you're playing games, you're probably not CPU-bound anyway. I'd be interested in what niches people here work in and what CPUs they look for because of their unique needs.
  - leetcrew 8y ago
    the people who care the most about frames per second are playing esports titles that don't demand much from the GPU. counterstrike is still CPU bound in most cases.
    - EugeneOZ 8y ago
      Esport is not about graphics quality at all. Try Assassins Creed - it will eat all of your CPU cores.

overcast 8y ago

Still rocking my LGA1366 Motherboard from 2008 with a Xeon X5675 @ 4.0ghz that I "upgraded" from an I7920 for $90 on ebay , 16GB of RAM, SSD, and an nvidia 1070 as the gaming PC. Handles everything at 2560x1600 60fps+ ultra quality(AA generally not necessary). Really don't quite understand the need to go crazy on computer hardware these days. Upgrading your GPU every 2-3 years seems plenty.

tinco 8y ago
I'm rocking the 920 with 6gb still. I have been hesitating to upgrade to the Xeon. I have always been so salty that I jumped in just before the EFI boat, I feel my motherboard is so archaic. Is the performance jump to the Xeon very noticeable?
- overcast 8y ago
  I think the 920 was fine, but the Xeon granted two more cores, and higher overclocking frequency for me, plus it was only $90. So more future proofing, as games take more advantage of multithreading. Increasing your RAM definitely should be on the list though.
ragequitta 8y ago
There is no way sort of some magical overclocking that a 1070 runs everything at 60 fps+ at that res. It has trouble at 1440p with many games. Note the minimum fps (which is the key factor): https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1070-graphics-card-roundup,4751-2.html https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/nvidia-geforce-gtx-1070...
- overcast 8y ago
  I can provide ALL the proof you need on my Asus STRIX 1070. I run everything at 2560x1600 synced to 60fps on my 30" monitor with Ultra settings. Those benchmarks are all enabling AA, which is just wasteful and not required at such resolutions. So yes, with AA, below the 60fps target. But right now my library of 418 Steam games, all run rock solid at those framerates. Metro, Batman, BF1/4/5, Witcher, Alien Isolation, Fallout, GTA, Bioshocks, whatever I throw at it. Though the point of this discussion was the CPU not being critical anymore. If you need more FPS, buy a more expensive video card, not a CPU.

RowanH 8y ago

My Overlocked 6600k vs Ryzen/1800x at stock speeds is night and day difference in "real world" performance. Even though general clock speeds are not that much different - the Ryzen machine is the one I want to use. Desktop productivity improves dramatically with a bunch more cores. Multiple browser tabs, background services, code editors open, VM's open... you can throw a lot of things at the Ryzen machine before you start noticing it starting to slow down. On the 6600 machine it doesn't take much before you notice it chugging.

nine_k 8y ago
Is the amount of RAM the same?
- FractalParadigm 8y ago
  Not the OP but I upgraded from 6600K -> 1800X and honestly they're not even in the same ballpark performance-wise. When you come across software that can take advantage of multiple threads it's not even a contest, the 1800X just walks away laughing. One example I can think of off the top of my head is gaming and transcoding (Plex server) at the same time. Even with QuickSync enabled and running, transcoding HEVC->x264 would regularly stutter and drop frames while a game is running, while also affecting the games framerate. The 1800X (without hardware accelerated video transcoding) just plows through it like it's nothing. I've even had it transcode 10-bit HDR video while playing Forza Horizon 4, not a single loss of framerate in either the game or the video. The extra cores/threads are nothing to scoff at when software can take advantage of them. My upgrade consisted of only the board and CPU; same RAM, GPU, PSU, SSD, etc.
- RowanH 8y ago
  Same amount of ram, different speeds (2133 vs 3000). I attribute the performance largely to the additional cores... the machine has that processor power sitting ready and waiting.
tracker1 8y ago
I'm curious about the amount of memory as well as the drive performance... if you went from 8GB on an HDD to 16+ with an SSD or NVME, huge difference.

xoa 8y ago

Feature differences and bandwidth can still be a significant issue though, and could become more so as raw single thread general CPU performance increases slow down while the surrounding ecosystem continues to improve. More PCIe lanes, more special purpose instructions, more features like ECC and IOMMU support becoming universal standards would all be nice outcomes to see. This could represent a real additional long term opportunity to AMD as well, because historically Intel has been pretty fond of creating profitable product line segmentation via only allowing certain features on certain chips. And they've been mediocre about boosting interconnect capacity as well. Perhaps AMD doesn't necessarily need to match them as well in single thread performance if they can get the absolute difference down to a few percent, but be much friendlier then Intel in terms of not artificially restricting useful extra CPU features? I wonder if that becoming an area of competition again could bring some nice energy back to the market? It's been something that's personally making me reconsider at least. I used to stick to Intel more despite price differences because of their performance advantages, but now I look at the rest of the ecosystem and start to calculate adding a few GPUs, NVMe storage, 10G networking, possibly other accelerator/utility cards and future interconnects, and the PCIe lanes seem to get sucked up a lot faster then they used to. With Ryzen/Epyc AMD is offering a full 64 lanes it looks like vs Intel's 24 here, and even with the latest Xeon I think it's now up to 48 lanes from 32? The difference there isn't nothing if overall system performance starts to depend less on just the CPU then on the overall ability to move data around and keep various more special purpose accelerators fed.

sangaya 8y ago

Check out this benchmark comparison: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-9900K-vs-Intel-Core-i7-2600/4028vs620 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i9-9900K-vs... It tells you more than the spec sheet comparison.

kbenson 8y ago
It's better than indicated in GP, but as an indicator of how good modern CPUs are in comparison to older ones, this page page overstates the case. The older CPU is 4-core but 8-thread (hyperthreads), the newer one is 8-core and 8-thread (no hyperthreads). The multi-core benchmarks are much higher for the newer CPU because it has twice as many cores, so that is inflating the overall score quite a bit. That said, it's not as simple as halving that score, as hyperthreads don't scale quite the same way, so it depends on how the multi-core test is formulated. Edit: Oh, wow, as taspeotis points out it's not even the same two CPUs in the original Intel Ark comparison (which I was working off of from memory when noting cores and threads). The i9-9700k is actually an 8-core and 16-thread (hyperthreads) CPU, so it is actually literally twice as many cores and threads. It's still better performance, but not nearly as lopsided as it even seemed before, given those resources.
taspeotis 8y ago
GP said “I'm comparing the i7 here to the i7 in my current computer” and you linked to an i9 vs i7 comparison...
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
0-_-0 8y ago
53% single core clock improvement over almost 8 years. Transistor count has increased from 1B to about 7B, which is roughly in line with Moore's law though...

Quequau 8y ago

I am currently using an early 2008 MacPro and I too had a time in my life when I expected I would have to build a new computer every two years.

wil421 8y ago

I have a Kaby Lake i7 and my last build was a i7-920 (Bloomfield). The old chip is a beast but the power consumption is a lot more. One thing I use is Intel QSV and the intel graphics chip. I don’t need a GPU at this time and it’s nice to have the option.

lotyrin 8y ago

What are you comparing, because 50% more cache and double the memory and PCIe bandwidth is actually a really big deal?