4 ms·

I was given an HP Z230 workstation when I started at Microsoft five years ago and haven't upgraded since then, despite being well beyond eligible for a hardware

I was given an HP Z230 workstation when I started at Microsoft five years ago and haven't upgraded since then, despite being well beyond eligible for a hardware refresh. It has 32 GB of RAM and an (edit) 4-core 8-thread i7-4770, plus an OS SSD with several data HDDs (integrated graphics, but meh). CPU performance has been basically stagnant for the past half-decade. Even on my home PC (purchased around the same time) the only thing I've changed is the graphics card - and that was to sell it for a less-powerful one, then buy back the original card years later for cheap! Maybe if you want to play games on the cutting edge of VR then constant upgrades are necessary, but five-year-old desktop hardware should be fine for nearly anyone.

officialchicken 7y ago
Minor detail: the entire i7-4770xx line of products are 4-core, 8-threads CPUs[0] [0] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/search.html?_charset_=UTF-8&q=i7-4770 https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/search.html?_cha...
gruez 7y ago
>CPU performance has been basically stagnant for the past half-decade what? comparing an i7-4770 to an i7-8700 (current gen, similar launch price), the latter is 25%-86% faster, depending on your workloads. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8700-vs-Intel-Core-i7-4770/3940vs1978 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8700-vs-...
- eropple 7y ago
  The i7-8700 is heckin' fast, but if you look at it over time, the rate of improvement has slowed down quite a bit. The 4770 is six years old. The Core 2 Duo E6600 is its price-comparable equivalent from six years before that. An E6600 has a PassMark score of 1553. An i7-4770 has a PassMark score of 9780. An i7-8700 has a score of 15155. And we shouldn't miss that that's way faster! But the slope of that curve is a lot shallower than it has been historically, and a 2x improvement probably doesn't move the needle in the way that a 6x improvement does. We're spoiled, in that we can say such an improvement no longer moves the needle. But it also means that hardware stays viable for much, much longer.
- ianhowson 7y ago
  That link shows only a 25% improvement in single-core performance in four generations. That's an embarrassment, Intel. Throwing more cores at a problem has never been difficult. The whole point of the article is that you can buy a manycore workstation for peanuts. If manycores solves your workload, you're going to have a good time. If, like most power users, you need more single-thread performance, CPU performance has been stagnant.
eropple 7y ago
That i7-4770 is a great processor (though it's 4c8t, not 8c); I actually still have an i5-3570k running in my HTPC/little gaming rig and it too is ticking along just fine. For my money, the Ivy Bridge and Haswell processors are the best bang-for-the-buck for processors, ever. The one note I'd add about CPUs is that they've gotten a lot wider over the last couple years. IPC has changed iteratively (AMD's has changed a lot though, particularly for Zen 2) but parallelism really has improved many workloads over time. Ryzen made it a lot easier to throw 8 cores/16 threads at a problem and for a lot of stuff folks around here are likely to care about that matters a good bit. And Ryzen 2 makes it downright affordable to throw 12c/24t at a problem. (He said, getting ready to throw down on a 3900X for video encoding...)
- post_break 7y ago
  I love my 4770k, on air mine hits 4.4ghz stable.

officialchicken 7y ago

Minor detail: the entire i7-4770xx line of products are 4-core, 8-threads CPUs[0] [0] https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/search.html?_charset_=UTF-8&q=i7-4770 https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/search.html?_cha...

gruez 7y ago

>CPU performance has been basically stagnant for the past half-decade what? comparing an i7-4770 to an i7-8700 (current gen, similar launch price), the latter is 25%-86% faster, depending on your workloads. https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8700-vs-Intel-Core-i7-4770/3940vs1978 https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i7-8700-vs-...

eropple 7y ago
The i7-8700 is heckin' fast, but if you look at it over time, the rate of improvement has slowed down quite a bit. The 4770 is six years old. The Core 2 Duo E6600 is its price-comparable equivalent from six years before that. An E6600 has a PassMark score of 1553. An i7-4770 has a PassMark score of 9780. An i7-8700 has a score of 15155. And we shouldn't miss that that's way faster! But the slope of that curve is a lot shallower than it has been historically, and a 2x improvement probably doesn't move the needle in the way that a 6x improvement does. We're spoiled, in that we can say such an improvement no longer moves the needle. But it also means that hardware stays viable for much, much longer.
ianhowson 7y ago
That link shows only a 25% improvement in single-core performance in four generations. That's an embarrassment, Intel. Throwing more cores at a problem has never been difficult. The whole point of the article is that you can buy a manycore workstation for peanuts. If manycores solves your workload, you're going to have a good time. If, like most power users, you need more single-thread performance, CPU performance has been stagnant.

eropple 7y ago

That i7-4770 is a great processor (though it's 4c8t, not 8c); I actually still have an i5-3570k running in my HTPC/little gaming rig and it too is ticking along just fine. For my money, the Ivy Bridge and Haswell processors are the best bang-for-the-buck for processors, ever. The one note I'd add about CPUs is that they've gotten a lot wider over the last couple years. IPC has changed iteratively (AMD's has changed a lot though, particularly for Zen 2) but parallelism really has improved many workloads over time. Ryzen made it a lot easier to throw 8 cores/16 threads at a problem and for a lot of stuff folks around here are likely to care about that matters a good bit. And Ryzen 2 makes it downright affordable to throw 12c/24t at a problem. (He said, getting ready to throw down on a 3900X for video encoding...)

post_break 7y ago
I love my 4770k, on air mine hits 4.4ghz stable.