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I recently brought back to life a PC that a friend was about to throw away. It has an Intel i7 3820 CPU and running latest Ubuntu. Here are my results from Gee

I recently brought back to life a PC that a friend was about to throw away. It has an Intel i7 3820 CPU and running latest Ubuntu. Here are my results from Geekbench 5.0.2 Tryout for Linux x86 (64-bit) before and after the "mitigations=off": mitigations on score: 865 Single-Core Score 2624 Multi-Core Score mitigations off score: 912 Single-Core Score 3995 Multi-Core Score

forinti 7y ago
Throw away an i7? That's a bit wasteful.
- letitburn 7y ago
  The cheapest Ryzen outperforms it.
- wtallis 7y ago
  That chip's almost 8 years old. It can barely keep up with today's entry-level desktop processors, and draws twice as much power while doing so.
  - opencl 7y ago
    Even with the mitigations that chip is significantly faster than an athlon 200GE, without them it's more than twice as fast (in geekbench at least).
    - xigency 7y ago
      Athlon? I'm surprised to see that AMD is still using that brand name.
      - opencl 7y ago
        It's just the brand for their super low end stuff, similar to how Intel is still using the Pentium name.
    - FDSGSG 7y ago
      I bet it also uses much more than twice the power.
  - delusional 7y ago
    I'm still rocking the i7 920. It's still running perfectly fine. I throw a new gpu in it every couple of years and have never had performance problems.
    - forinti 7y ago
      Best machine in the house is an i3 540 running Ubuntu. I recently upgraded RAM to 12GB. It is perfectly fine for my needs: mostly browsing, some video editing, and coding Perl.
    - seabrookmx 7y ago
      I recently moved from a 920 to an 8700k. The 920 will bottleneck GPUs as slow as a GTX970 in some titles (PUBG, Rage 2 for example). Great chip and still plenty for development/daily use, but IMO past its prime for gaming. I also had to have expansion cards for USB 3.1 and SATA 3 which was annoying. NVMe is out of the question :(
      - ScannerBrightly 7y ago
        Gaming, sure, but just throwing an i7 away? Heck, my ham radio PC is a dual core duo.
        seabrookmx 7y ago
        Oh yeah I'm not advocating tossing them. There's lots of opportunities to repurpose a chip like that. I just see lots of people saying things like "still daily driving an abacus!" as if there's been no progress on CPU development in the last 10 years, and that's just false. Progress has _slowed_, but a modern Ryzen or i-Series is quantifiably better than older gear.
        sjwright 7y ago
        And if you use the computer extensively and live in a country where electricity is expensive, you could also be paying for that inefficiency in your utility bill.
  - runjake 7y ago
    It’s arguable whether it keeps up but it offers perfectly fine performance for pretty much whatever most people want to do, including a lot of gaming (with a proper GPU). It does use considerable more power to do so — a few additional LED bulbs worth. In general, processor performance has outpaced consumer needs for quite some time and most people could get along fine and performant with this 8 year old processor. Citation: have and still use one, right next to my blown out 8700k system.
    - bingerman 7y ago
      Indeed, Sandy Bridge i7-2600 is still more than enough for me (no gaming but crunching numbers frequently).
      - Matthias247 7y ago
        Probably one of the best investments in the past decade. I had a 2500K for 6 years and only sold it since I moved and didn't carry the old desktop with me. Performance-wise it was still going strong and left nothing to be desired. Definitely faster than the 2015 Macbook Pro I had been using since then - which is also not that bad as an everyday PC.
    - CameronNemo 7y ago
      Can confirm, I have been using an old processor in my T430 for a couple years and it works great, even when compiling Rust projects. battery life is terrible, though. So I have a Pinebook Pro coming in, hopefully there are no ARM-related headaches but even with some large papercuts I think it will be an improvement for usability.
  - marmaduke 7y ago
    Bla Bla bla. We have a ton of Westmere generations running everything from HPC workloads to kubernetes to desktop machines which are fine.
  - wenc 7y ago
    Eh. My main desktop is a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz from 2005. I'm typing this comment on said machine right now. It's running Kubuntu and I'm running the latest versions of everything on this -- Chrome, RStudio, etc. -- and it runs plenty fast. I have a Windows 10 computer at work with the latest i7 chip which feels slightly faster, but not that much. Most software these days aren't CPU-bound but IO bound. I got the most performance boost upgrading to an SSD and upping the RAM to 8 GB. If you run Linux, you can have a very comfortable experience running on hardware from yesteryears. Throwing out a perfectly good machine is a waste.
  - alerighi 7y ago
    I have an i7 3770k, overclocked to 4.4Ghz, it runs with no problem every workflow I need. Newer processors have more cores for sure, but if we look at single-core performance there isn't so much difference, and my almost 8 years old overclocked i7 runs probably faster for a single threaded application than a new 16 core Ryzen. Of course if we talk about multi threaded workflows a newer CPU is better.
- snagglegaggle 7y ago
  The mitigations can halve peformance. People need to make Intel pay up.
- Bootwizard 7y ago
  Many people think about Intel branding this way. And I blame Intel for the confusion. The number after the "i" is not what matters when comparing chips between generations, it's the number after. This is a 3rd generation chip as you can see it's a 3000 series. Currently for sale are generation 9 (9000), and these are even out the door soon. 10th gen is right around the corner. Within these thousand series are the ACTUAL part numbers. Ex: 9900K, 9980XE, etc. These names are even more confusing but are what tell you the real power of a chip within the lineup for that year.
  - zrm 7y ago
    i3-8121U (one year old) vs. i7-2600K (eight years old): https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2367?vs=2413 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2367?vs=2413 The newer i3 wins a few, and has much lower power consumption, but the old i7 wins more. Naturally the 2018 i7 thoroughly defeats the eight year old one (while using more power): https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2258?vs=2413 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2258?vs=2413 But the generation is only one factor. Generational improvements don't always win over other factors like clock speed, cache size, core count, etc.
    - em500 7y ago
      The i7-2600K is a desktop CPU, the i3-8121U is a laptop CPU. A recent desktop i3 is clearly faster: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2277?vs=2413 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2277?vs=2413
      - Matthias247 7y ago
        And not only that. The K series is the unlocked high-performance version of the desktop series. Whereas U is the low-voltage/ultrabook version of the mobile series. So they are sitting pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum (if we remove server and phone CPUs from the picture), and it's no huge surprise that it still shows up as faster.
      - Tuna-Fish 7y ago
Tade0 7y ago
My old, but still functioning i5 3210 laptop has exactly half the single-core speed of the 2018 MBP. Still a viable development machine!
- bitL 7y ago
  There was a huge jump in mobile CPU performance between 7th and 8th gen; 8th gen mobile i7 was on the level of desktop 4790k, almost doubled the performance of 7th gen i7.
  - gambiting 7y ago
    Funny that you mention the 4790K, because that's exactly the setup I have and I was shocked how fast the i7-8565U is is in my Razer Blade Stealth. When I first got that laptop, just for a test I started a video conversion of a blu-ray movie in handbrake on both my desktop(i7-4790K) and my laptop(i7-8565U) at the exact same time, and both machines finished after 2 hours within a minute of each other. It's absolutely remarkable how fast that mobile chip is, while only using 25W of power vs the 4790K's 90W.
  - happycube 7y ago
    Yup. 8th gen finally made the 15W i7's quad core, as opposed to being more or less low-clock/power desktop i3's. The turbos were nicely tuned too, so single-thread perf went up too. Reportedly for the 10th gen, a lot of said i7's will be equivalent to desktop i3's (4C/8T) again. (progress?)

forinti 7y ago

Throw away an i7? That's a bit wasteful.

letitburn 7y ago
The cheapest Ryzen outperforms it.
wtallis 7y ago
That chip's almost 8 years old. It can barely keep up with today's entry-level desktop processors, and draws twice as much power while doing so.
- opencl 7y ago
  Even with the mitigations that chip is significantly faster than an athlon 200GE, without them it's more than twice as fast (in geekbench at least).
  - xigency 7y ago
    Athlon? I'm surprised to see that AMD is still using that brand name.
    - opencl 7y ago
      It's just the brand for their super low end stuff, similar to how Intel is still using the Pentium name.
  - FDSGSG 7y ago
    I bet it also uses much more than twice the power.
- delusional 7y ago
  I'm still rocking the i7 920. It's still running perfectly fine. I throw a new gpu in it every couple of years and have never had performance problems.
  - forinti 7y ago
    Best machine in the house is an i3 540 running Ubuntu. I recently upgraded RAM to 12GB. It is perfectly fine for my needs: mostly browsing, some video editing, and coding Perl.
  - seabrookmx 7y ago
    I recently moved from a 920 to an 8700k. The 920 will bottleneck GPUs as slow as a GTX970 in some titles (PUBG, Rage 2 for example). Great chip and still plenty for development/daily use, but IMO past its prime for gaming. I also had to have expansion cards for USB 3.1 and SATA 3 which was annoying. NVMe is out of the question :(
    - ScannerBrightly 7y ago
      Gaming, sure, but just throwing an i7 away? Heck, my ham radio PC is a dual core duo.
      - seabrookmx 7y ago
        Oh yeah I'm not advocating tossing them. There's lots of opportunities to repurpose a chip like that. I just see lots of people saying things like "still daily driving an abacus!" as if there's been no progress on CPU development in the last 10 years, and that's just false. Progress has _slowed_, but a modern Ryzen or i-Series is quantifiably better than older gear.
        sjwright 7y ago
        And if you use the computer extensively and live in a country where electricity is expensive, you could also be paying for that inefficiency in your utility bill.
- runjake 7y ago
  It’s arguable whether it keeps up but it offers perfectly fine performance for pretty much whatever most people want to do, including a lot of gaming (with a proper GPU). It does use considerable more power to do so — a few additional LED bulbs worth. In general, processor performance has outpaced consumer needs for quite some time and most people could get along fine and performant with this 8 year old processor. Citation: have and still use one, right next to my blown out 8700k system.
  - bingerman 7y ago
    Indeed, Sandy Bridge i7-2600 is still more than enough for me (no gaming but crunching numbers frequently).
    - Matthias247 7y ago
      Probably one of the best investments in the past decade. I had a 2500K for 6 years and only sold it since I moved and didn't carry the old desktop with me. Performance-wise it was still going strong and left nothing to be desired. Definitely faster than the 2015 Macbook Pro I had been using since then - which is also not that bad as an everyday PC.
  - CameronNemo 7y ago
    Can confirm, I have been using an old processor in my T430 for a couple years and it works great, even when compiling Rust projects. battery life is terrible, though. So I have a Pinebook Pro coming in, hopefully there are no ARM-related headaches but even with some large papercuts I think it will be an improvement for usability.
- marmaduke 7y ago
  Bla Bla bla. We have a ton of Westmere generations running everything from HPC workloads to kubernetes to desktop machines which are fine.
- wenc 7y ago
  Eh. My main desktop is a Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz from 2005. I'm typing this comment on said machine right now. It's running Kubuntu and I'm running the latest versions of everything on this -- Chrome, RStudio, etc. -- and it runs plenty fast. I have a Windows 10 computer at work with the latest i7 chip which feels slightly faster, but not that much. Most software these days aren't CPU-bound but IO bound. I got the most performance boost upgrading to an SSD and upping the RAM to 8 GB. If you run Linux, you can have a very comfortable experience running on hardware from yesteryears. Throwing out a perfectly good machine is a waste.
- alerighi 7y ago
  I have an i7 3770k, overclocked to 4.4Ghz, it runs with no problem every workflow I need. Newer processors have more cores for sure, but if we look at single-core performance there isn't so much difference, and my almost 8 years old overclocked i7 runs probably faster for a single threaded application than a new 16 core Ryzen. Of course if we talk about multi threaded workflows a newer CPU is better.
snagglegaggle 7y ago
The mitigations can halve peformance. People need to make Intel pay up.
Bootwizard 7y ago
Many people think about Intel branding this way. And I blame Intel for the confusion. The number after the "i" is not what matters when comparing chips between generations, it's the number after. This is a 3rd generation chip as you can see it's a 3000 series. Currently for sale are generation 9 (9000), and these are even out the door soon. 10th gen is right around the corner. Within these thousand series are the ACTUAL part numbers. Ex: 9900K, 9980XE, etc. These names are even more confusing but are what tell you the real power of a chip within the lineup for that year.
- zrm 7y ago
  i3-8121U (one year old) vs. i7-2600K (eight years old): https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2367?vs=2413 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2367?vs=2413 The newer i3 wins a few, and has much lower power consumption, but the old i7 wins more. Naturally the 2018 i7 thoroughly defeats the eight year old one (while using more power): https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2258?vs=2413 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2258?vs=2413 But the generation is only one factor. Generational improvements don't always win over other factors like clock speed, cache size, core count, etc.
  - em500 7y ago
    The i7-2600K is a desktop CPU, the i3-8121U is a laptop CPU. A recent desktop i3 is clearly faster: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2277?vs=2413 https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2277?vs=2413
    - Matthias247 7y ago
      And not only that. The K series is the unlocked high-performance version of the desktop series. Whereas U is the low-voltage/ultrabook version of the mobile series. So they are sitting pretty much at the opposite end of the spectrum (if we remove server and phone CPUs from the picture), and it's no huge surprise that it still shows up as faster.
    - Tuna-Fish 7y ago

Tade0 7y ago

My old, but still functioning i5 3210 laptop has exactly half the single-core speed of the 2018 MBP. Still a viable development machine!

bitL 7y ago
There was a huge jump in mobile CPU performance between 7th and 8th gen; 8th gen mobile i7 was on the level of desktop 4790k, almost doubled the performance of 7th gen i7.
- gambiting 7y ago
  Funny that you mention the 4790K, because that's exactly the setup I have and I was shocked how fast the i7-8565U is is in my Razer Blade Stealth. When I first got that laptop, just for a test I started a video conversion of a blu-ray movie in handbrake on both my desktop(i7-4790K) and my laptop(i7-8565U) at the exact same time, and both machines finished after 2 hours within a minute of each other. It's absolutely remarkable how fast that mobile chip is, while only using 25W of power vs the 4790K's 90W.
- happycube 7y ago
  Yup. 8th gen finally made the 15W i7's quad core, as opposed to being more or less low-clock/power desktop i3's. The turbos were nicely tuned too, so single-thread perf went up too. Reportedly for the 10th gen, a lot of said i7's will be equivalent to desktop i3's (4C/8T) again. (progress?)