29 ms·

> I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 stays the same over 10+ years I think that is because the performance has been the same for the

> I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 stays the same over 10+ years I think that is because the performance has been the same for the past 10+ years.

kevstev 6y ago
I am continually astounded that the quad core sandy bridge core-i7 I bought in January 2011 is still completely serviceable for pretty much all tasks outside of gaming. The bezel and overall form factor is clownishly large by todays standards, and the screen is starting to look a bit faded, but as a portable but mostly stationary PC it still works great alongside my main laptop I use for work. I knew back in 2011 I was buying something that was going to be pretty future proof, but 10 years... I would have laughed at you.
- cptnapalm 6y ago
  I got a 2009 Mac Pro with dual sockets at a state auction and put in a couple of inexpensive hexcore Xeons. The sum total after 2 graphics cards and 48 GB of RAM was less than $750 and it runs everything pretty well.
- KMnO4 6y ago
  I think that’s because 99% of regular computer tasks don’t need 24 cores operating at 5 billion cycles per second. The differences between an i7-4xxx and i7-11xxx are more about hardware acceleration, eg HEVC and SIMD. That’s why they look so much better in benchmarks that are designed with that in mind. My main desktop is an unRAID server that hosts multiple VMs. Only yesterday I discovered that I accidentally only gave Windows four (of my 16) cores. Literally 3/4 of the processor was unused for months, and I didn’t notice any slow performance the entire time.
  - thehnguy 6y ago
    This is perhaps the real genius of the M1. It's a great chip and all. But when you make it the only choice, people are finding the only choice is more than sufficient. And now Apple only has to produce one piece of silicon for their iMacs, iPad Pro, and Laptops. What a boon for logistics.
    - fragmede 6y ago
      The success of the M1 is a boon for Apple, but I'm not sure that only having to produce one CPU to be used across all devices is where the optimization lies, especially considering that Apple is selling the iPhone SE with an older CPU and not simplifying by not selling it.
      - pranavjoneja 6y ago
        Just because it's being sold today doesn't mean it's actively manufactured still. They could have stockpiled the older processors or have spare inventory to continue meeting demand
  - chrisco255 6y ago
    Speak for yourself. Me personally? I would like one core per Chrome tab.
    - rjzzleep 6y ago
      Yeah, 2500 cores per CPU sure would be nice.
    - sillysaurusx 6y ago
      My new M1 constantly freezes, and I’m pretty sure it’s because of chrome. Or the secret SSD thrashing design flaw that Apple is hoping nobody talks about till they quietly fix it. Was a bit disappointing. I was like, finally! A new thing! I’m freeeeeee..... wait no it still freezes, I miss sandy bridge, etc.
      - vesrah 6y ago
        Is the the 8GB model? I had the same issue with my workload and found that it was always under high memory pressure, upgrading to a 16GB model fixed it for me.
        sillysaurusx 6y ago
        It’s the 16GB. The memory pressure is indeed the issue. I find it hilarious that Apple accidentally inverted their LRU into an MRU and constantly swaps for no reason, yet it’s still so fast that nobody even noticed during QA. Mine has already read/wrote 48TB in the first three weeks; at this rate the SSD will be dead in three years. (If you haven’t looked into SSDGate yet, be sure to check your smartmon to see whether you’re affected.)
        msie 6y ago
        This guy seems to have pinpointed the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMCoQmsv-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMCoQmsv-I The problem is unoptimized apps running on Rosetta2.
  - mh8h 6y ago
    I have a 15" retina MacBook Pro from 2012, and another from 2018. The one from 2012 is fine for everyday use. But the difference in single core performance, and also IO, is substantial. That's really important when it comes to a lot of typical development work. For example Rails starts at least 2x faster on the newer laptop.
- ynik 6y ago
  Two years ago when I got the Lenovo e590 (Intel Core i5-8265U), I benchmarked running the unit tests of my project on it. (though I didn't really intend on using the e590 for development) I compared against my old desktop from 2010 (1st-gen Core i5-750). Turns out that the old desktop won by a solid 10% margin! A whole decade of new Intel generations still can't make up for the disadvantage of using a mobile CPU. P.S. The e590 barely survived 2 years and is dead now (broken USB-C charging port).
- simonh 6y ago
  I have to admit this is right. Even my old 2012 i7 Mac mini is still a perfectly serviceable machine to this day.
  - officeplant 6y ago
    Late-2012 ivy bridge i5 Mac Mini here. For a dual core machine it's really not all that bad of a daily driver experience. Makes me sad that I have to spend a crazy amount of money to get 16GB of ram and 1TB of SSD in a M1 Mini to match what I currently use. (although I understand the 1TB of SSD in the M1 is vastly superior)
    - nemacol 6y ago
      Just for the fun of it, I tried to play WoW classic on my late-2012 mac mini and it ran like a toaster oven, but it worked just fine. Pretty fun. After putting the SSD in it, of course.
      - officeplant 6y ago
        Yeah smcfancontrol is a must. I keep the fan around ~3000rpm during moderate use and bump it up to 5000rpm or max it out if I'm going to game or render something. I've been tempted to look into TB2 to TB3 adapters and eGPU's but its a janky solution to extending the life of an 8+ year old machine.
      - kergonath 6y ago
        I used to play WoW on a G4 PowerBook! To be honest, it was decent, but the resolution was not great. I remember vividly having to look at the ground and zoom in all the way just to be able to go from the bank to the AH at IF. Hopefully whatever Intel GPU you have in your Mini is better than the Radeon 9700 in my old laptop.
    - reaperducer 6y ago
      11-inch 2011 MacBook Air here. It's my main machine. I'll turn it into a media server once Apple comes out with an Mx machine with a screen of at least 15 inches.
- MrFoof 6y ago
  I'm also staring at a Mid-2011 Sandy Bridge quad-core iMac that's been on my desk since May 2011. It'll be replaced come August-ish with a 32-core Zen 3 Threadripper (with 256GB of ECC). Though in a few years I'll likely put an M3 Mac Mini alongside it to figure out when I'll feel comfortable going to ARM full time, as all my customers (and their applications) are still native x86 only... for now.
- pdimitar 6y ago
  My gaming PC is almost 10 years old and is with an i7 3770. Only upgrade was a GTX 980 five or six years ago. That thing flies for anything and everything I put it through. One day I'll retire it as a gaming machine and convert it to a Linux server or a casual workstation and I am sure it's going to be even faster than Win10.
  - strictnein 6y ago
    Yeah, I'd like to upgrade my gaming system (4970k and a GTX1080ti) but past wanting to play at 4k and experience ray tracing there is almost no reason to do so. Now, if the 3080 was actually available at MSRP I'd probably have upgraded, but that's at least a year away from happening.
    - pdimitar 6y ago
      IMO go big or go home in this case. For a gaming machine I'd aim for some of the Ryzen 5000's (likely even the 5700 is an overkill) and an RTX 3090 so I can play 3440x1440 @ 144FPS (or maybe even 4K @ 120FPS). As it is, I almost have no reason to upgrade my gaming machine right now. Playing on a 21:9 wide display (2560x1080) and never go below 70-80 FPS in any game. Usually it's 100-120 FPS.
      - notJim 6y ago
        The problem with these cards is actually being able to get one. Even if you've got the $2k to spend for a 3090, good luck with finding stock.
        pdimitar 6y ago
        True. Right now I could only buy an RTX 3090 for 3100 EUR (~3740 USD) and I am not willing to pay that much. But I am happy to wait. Upgrading my gaming machine is a very low prio.
  - bayindirh 6y ago
    My primary desktop is a 3770K running Linux. That CPU's the unexpected beast. Just churning through what you throw at it with incredible speed even for today. I process RAW photos, encode some audio and develop high performance scientific software on it (testing it lowers my heating bills, somewhat). I want to try one of the new Ryzen CPUs, but I have no reason to upgrade.
- nemacol 6y ago
  I built my own gaming pc back in Nov 2010 with an i7-970 24g ram. While I have upgraded the GPU twice and upgraded to larger SSD's as prices have come down, I am still using the same machine for gaming. Not that what I am doing is very intense or hardcore intense graphics. I can comfortably play all the Blizzard titles, modern FPS like whatever COD is newest, etc. Maybe not on max settings anymore. Still, I am impressed by how much I have gotten out of my machine.
- stjohnswarts 6y ago
  Yep and take computer from 2001 and run it in 2011, you wouldn't have been nearly as happy with the performance. There have been incremental upgrades but mostly just the core count which is great for handling server stuff but not nearly as noticeable as Hz counts increases
  - brewdad 6y ago
    The other main improvement in the past 10 years is the power draw. You can get more than 10 hours of battery life in a machine that weighs less than 3 lbs. That would have been unthinkable a decade ago. CPU improvements are only part of the story in making that happen but the are certainly far ahead of where things were in the not so distant past.
    - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
      10 hour battery life was achievable 15 years ago on Pentium M provided you under-volted, under-clocked, and had a high capacity battery.
      - edvinbesic 6y ago
        How far does this goalpost go?
        kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
        The point is that the technology for long life laptops has been ready for a long time. It's just that Intel marketing calls all the shots and they only wanted to sell multicore space heaters with space heater memory to sweeten the deal. With this burden on chipset side, it was impossible to compensate with extra amp hours and maintain portable weight.
        rualca 6y ago
        > The point is that the technology for long life laptops has been ready for a long time. You're desperately moving the goal post to ridiculous places. It's like claiming that walking on the moon is supposed to be considered normal just because the technology has been ready for a long time. That claim is irrelevant, isn't it? I mean, what good does a "technically it's possible" claim do if a) no, it's clearly not possible outside exceptionally rare circumstances b) the average consumer device is way behind any of those outlandish claims.
- kitsunesoba 6y ago
  If it weren’t for the fact that it’s not good at being a laptop (chunky, heavy, hot), I’d be perfectly happy using my old QX9300 (Core 2 Quad) workstation laptop for day to day. With an SSD and the Bluetooth+Wifi upgraded to Intel AX200 it’s only marginally slower than my newer x86 boxes at most things, and its 15.4” 1920x1200 display is still nicer than what ships on a lot of laptops today. Wouldn’t want to use it as a dev machine, but any less demanding usage would be fine.
- KozmoNau7 6y ago
  My desktop is 2010 vintage 6-core Phenom II 1100T with 16GB RAM, the motherboard is officially maxed out, but I've been told it can take 32GB just fine. It has been upgraded with an SSD and more recently a Radeon RX560, and it really does everything I need. Newer games do need lower settings, but it'll motor through most games at 720p. I added a PCIe USB-C interface card, so I'm not even stuck at USB 2.0 anymore. I have considered replacing it with something smaller, now that all of my files are on a NAS and I don't need room for 5-6 drives in this machine. But I just don't feel like I would be getting enough of an improvement over what I already have, even with hefty new parts. My laptop is a 2011 vintage X220i, and that is starting to feel a little bit behind, mostly thanks to the i3 inside. But it connects to 5GHz WiFi and is fast enough for browsing and video playback, so for now it keeps on truckin'. Actually the best upgrade would be a decently powerful 12-14" laptop paired with an eGPU dock. That setup would handily replace both machines, but eGPUs just aren't a mature configuration yet, especially combined with Linux. Maybe in a few years.
  - top_kekeroni_m8 5y ago
    Gaming at 720p in 2021? Oh come on, you really need to try some 1440p/144hz gaming ;)
- BeFlatXIII 6y ago
  There is only one other popular task that a decade-old CPU can’t handle acceptably well: running a web browser. Outside of that, computers have been good enough ever since HiDPI/Retina screens became standard.
- ska 6y ago
  > I bought in January 2011 is still completely serviceable for pretty Isn't this essentially what Apple's observation was (and hence their spec choices)?
- brailsafe 6y ago
  Which computer are you referring to?
- neycoda 6y ago
  I have a quad core i7 from 2013 and the laptop still runs just as fast. I had to replace the hard drive and the RAM is maxed at 16GB (not good for virtualization), but it runs like new except for some odd screen recording hiccups with Microsoft's Xbox thing, but really all of the performance problems seem to just be driver bugs in relation to Dell's way of doing things.
jean_tta 6y ago
Most people have no need to compare CPUs between mobile/non mobile or generation. They just need to know if the laptop they're looking at has the high end / middle end / low end CPU. You'd be comparing a new laptop with latest(-ish) CPUs. The i3/i5/i7 makes it plain & simple to know that. You don't need to figure out what the "middle end" CPU is called this year. It's the i5, problem solved.
- caslon 6y ago
  You can't forget that there are multiple variants of i3, i5 and i7 every year! And presumably now the i9 but I haven't been paying attention. 6400 6500 6600 6600k random assortment of numbers and letters! It hardly works! The consumer still has to do just as much work!
  - kijin 6y ago
    It's even worse these days. There are letters in the middle of the model name, e.g. i7-1165G7, not just at the beginning and end! That thing doesn't even sort. You have no idea where to position it without seeing the spec sheet and Passmark scores. We consumers have it easy, though. Go find some Xeon or EPYC model numbers and try to figure out which digit means what. They make absolutely no sense.
    - Dylan16807 5y ago
      > You have no idea where to position it without seeing the spec sheet and Passmark scores. You can probably get pretty far by adding the 3/5/7 to the generation number and sorting by the sum.
- jrumbut 6y ago
  This definitely feels like an engineer's approach to marketing.
- klelatti 6y ago
  The decision that people think about most is when to upgrade (by definition it stretches over a longer time period than the single point purchasing decision). That's why we have iPhone 7/8/9...13 and similarly for Samsung etc. If your i3/i5/i7 designation gives no clues then that's not helpful.
numlock86 6y ago
> I think that is because the performance has been the same for the past 10+ years. Ah yes, the exaggerated funny phrase. On a serious note, the performance difference from an i7 7th generation (7700k) to an i7 10th generation (10700k) felt quite impressive.
- onli 6y ago
  Not a surprise. Stronger cores and double the cores and threads. And that's not a theoretical difference, they had a performance uptick of up to 100% even in games [0]. [0]: https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%5B%5D=Intel+Core+i7-10700K&ids%5B%5D=Intel+Core+i7-7700K https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%...
  - DCKing 6y ago
    The 7700K and 10700K use virtually the same Skylake architecture cores with very minor tweaks between them. The only CPU performance gains Intel made in the 2015-2020 period were clock speeds, core counts and support for higher memory speeds. The 7700K and 10700K even share the same integrated graphics architecture.
    - onli 6y ago
      I think that's correct. But it is all true at the same time. The cores are stronger because of the higher clock they can achieve and how the turbo clock works, and the higher core count does make a big difference. Higher memory speed also helps (though the difference in practice on Z board should be just a matter of what was typically on the market). Intel UHD 630 is even usually a tiny bit faster than the Intel HD 630, even if that's also only from the clock difference - only now with the UHD 730 and 750 did they improve things there.
FpUser 6y ago
Not really. I had this exact case when modern i7 laptop had kicked the butt of my 10 year old desktop speed wise at the same number of cores. Not sure how's this trend would go when started now though.
makomk 6y ago
The overall performance of Intel's range of processors may not have changed much, but what they called an i3, i5 or i7 sure has lately. For example, the popular i7-7700k is most similar in terms of core count, clocks etc to the current i3 chips, and I don't think there was any real equivalent to the current i5 or i7 chips back then. If I remember rightly, the generations prior to that were still seeing actual performance improvements generation-on-generation too.
eloff 6y ago
The performance difference between i7s of 10 years ago versus today is more than 2x per core, and the number of cores have also more than doubled in that time period. That's over a 4x performance difference in 10 years, it's not quite the good old days of Moore's law, but it's still an exponential improvement.
- StrictDabbler 6y ago
  That sounds like an S-curve, not an exponential improvement. You can make any monotonically increasing function look exponential if you only have two points (f(n+x)/f(n)) and you get to pick both n and X. "It doubled over the past fifty years!" If looking at all the points shows the time it takes to double is way longer than it used to be you're probably on the top of the S. Which, ok, we know we're headed to an S-curve instead. There are limitations on what we can do on silicon, right? It's just that the CISC/Intel S-curve is way lower than the ARM/M1 S-curve. Intel got used to leaving a margin of performance sitting on the table because it'll be faster next year. They got lazy. As chip gains have slowed those margins have started to add up.
pjmlp 6y ago
This laptop from 2009, a core duo, has been maxed out to 8 GB and one 1 TB SSD disk, and running the latest W10 Pro version. I still do C++, .NET and Java programming on it just fine, use Office, Adobe software, and it is docker free.

> I've always thought Intel's marketing was a bit confused - i7 stays the same over 10+ years I think that is because the performance has been the same for the past 10+ years.

kevstev 6y ago

I am continually astounded that the quad core sandy bridge core-i7 I bought in January 2011 is still completely serviceable for pretty much all tasks outside of gaming. The bezel and overall form factor is clownishly large by todays standards, and the screen is starting to look a bit faded, but as a portable but mostly stationary PC it still works great alongside my main laptop I use for work. I knew back in 2011 I was buying something that was going to be pretty future proof, but 10 years... I would have laughed at you.

cptnapalm 6y ago
I got a 2009 Mac Pro with dual sockets at a state auction and put in a couple of inexpensive hexcore Xeons. The sum total after 2 graphics cards and 48 GB of RAM was less than $750 and it runs everything pretty well.
KMnO4 6y ago
I think that’s because 99% of regular computer tasks don’t need 24 cores operating at 5 billion cycles per second. The differences between an i7-4xxx and i7-11xxx are more about hardware acceleration, eg HEVC and SIMD. That’s why they look so much better in benchmarks that are designed with that in mind. My main desktop is an unRAID server that hosts multiple VMs. Only yesterday I discovered that I accidentally only gave Windows four (of my 16) cores. Literally 3/4 of the processor was unused for months, and I didn’t notice any slow performance the entire time.
- thehnguy 6y ago
  This is perhaps the real genius of the M1. It's a great chip and all. But when you make it the only choice, people are finding the only choice is more than sufficient. And now Apple only has to produce one piece of silicon for their iMacs, iPad Pro, and Laptops. What a boon for logistics.
  - fragmede 6y ago
    The success of the M1 is a boon for Apple, but I'm not sure that only having to produce one CPU to be used across all devices is where the optimization lies, especially considering that Apple is selling the iPhone SE with an older CPU and not simplifying by not selling it.
    - pranavjoneja 6y ago
      Just because it's being sold today doesn't mean it's actively manufactured still. They could have stockpiled the older processors or have spare inventory to continue meeting demand
- chrisco255 6y ago
  Speak for yourself. Me personally? I would like one core per Chrome tab.
  - rjzzleep 6y ago
    Yeah, 2500 cores per CPU sure would be nice.
  - sillysaurusx 6y ago
    My new M1 constantly freezes, and I’m pretty sure it’s because of chrome. Or the secret SSD thrashing design flaw that Apple is hoping nobody talks about till they quietly fix it. Was a bit disappointing. I was like, finally! A new thing! I’m freeeeeee..... wait no it still freezes, I miss sandy bridge, etc.
    - vesrah 6y ago
      Is the the 8GB model? I had the same issue with my workload and found that it was always under high memory pressure, upgrading to a 16GB model fixed it for me.
      - sillysaurusx 6y ago
        It’s the 16GB. The memory pressure is indeed the issue. I find it hilarious that Apple accidentally inverted their LRU into an MRU and constantly swaps for no reason, yet it’s still so fast that nobody even noticed during QA. Mine has already read/wrote 48TB in the first three weeks; at this rate the SSD will be dead in three years. (If you haven’t looked into SSDGate yet, be sure to check your smartmon to see whether you’re affected.)
        msie 6y ago
        This guy seems to have pinpointed the problem: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMCoQmsv-I https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FyMCoQmsv-I The problem is unoptimized apps running on Rosetta2.
- mh8h 6y ago
  I have a 15" retina MacBook Pro from 2012, and another from 2018. The one from 2012 is fine for everyday use. But the difference in single core performance, and also IO, is substantial. That's really important when it comes to a lot of typical development work. For example Rails starts at least 2x faster on the newer laptop.
ynik 6y ago
Two years ago when I got the Lenovo e590 (Intel Core i5-8265U), I benchmarked running the unit tests of my project on it. (though I didn't really intend on using the e590 for development) I compared against my old desktop from 2010 (1st-gen Core i5-750). Turns out that the old desktop won by a solid 10% margin! A whole decade of new Intel generations still can't make up for the disadvantage of using a mobile CPU. P.S. The e590 barely survived 2 years and is dead now (broken USB-C charging port).
simonh 6y ago
I have to admit this is right. Even my old 2012 i7 Mac mini is still a perfectly serviceable machine to this day.
- officeplant 6y ago
  Late-2012 ivy bridge i5 Mac Mini here. For a dual core machine it's really not all that bad of a daily driver experience. Makes me sad that I have to spend a crazy amount of money to get 16GB of ram and 1TB of SSD in a M1 Mini to match what I currently use. (although I understand the 1TB of SSD in the M1 is vastly superior)
  - nemacol 6y ago
    Just for the fun of it, I tried to play WoW classic on my late-2012 mac mini and it ran like a toaster oven, but it worked just fine. Pretty fun. After putting the SSD in it, of course.
    - officeplant 6y ago
      Yeah smcfancontrol is a must. I keep the fan around ~3000rpm during moderate use and bump it up to 5000rpm or max it out if I'm going to game or render something. I've been tempted to look into TB2 to TB3 adapters and eGPU's but its a janky solution to extending the life of an 8+ year old machine.
    - kergonath 6y ago
      I used to play WoW on a G4 PowerBook! To be honest, it was decent, but the resolution was not great. I remember vividly having to look at the ground and zoom in all the way just to be able to go from the bank to the AH at IF. Hopefully whatever Intel GPU you have in your Mini is better than the Radeon 9700 in my old laptop.
  - reaperducer 6y ago
    11-inch 2011 MacBook Air here. It's my main machine. I'll turn it into a media server once Apple comes out with an Mx machine with a screen of at least 15 inches.
MrFoof 6y ago
I'm also staring at a Mid-2011 Sandy Bridge quad-core iMac that's been on my desk since May 2011. It'll be replaced come August-ish with a 32-core Zen 3 Threadripper (with 256GB of ECC). Though in a few years I'll likely put an M3 Mac Mini alongside it to figure out when I'll feel comfortable going to ARM full time, as all my customers (and their applications) are still native x86 only... for now.
pdimitar 6y ago
My gaming PC is almost 10 years old and is with an i7 3770. Only upgrade was a GTX 980 five or six years ago. That thing flies for anything and everything I put it through. One day I'll retire it as a gaming machine and convert it to a Linux server or a casual workstation and I am sure it's going to be even faster than Win10.
- strictnein 6y ago
  Yeah, I'd like to upgrade my gaming system (4970k and a GTX1080ti) but past wanting to play at 4k and experience ray tracing there is almost no reason to do so. Now, if the 3080 was actually available at MSRP I'd probably have upgraded, but that's at least a year away from happening.
  - pdimitar 6y ago
    IMO go big or go home in this case. For a gaming machine I'd aim for some of the Ryzen 5000's (likely even the 5700 is an overkill) and an RTX 3090 so I can play 3440x1440 @ 144FPS (or maybe even 4K @ 120FPS). As it is, I almost have no reason to upgrade my gaming machine right now. Playing on a 21:9 wide display (2560x1080) and never go below 70-80 FPS in any game. Usually it's 100-120 FPS.
    - notJim 6y ago
      The problem with these cards is actually being able to get one. Even if you've got the $2k to spend for a 3090, good luck with finding stock.
      - pdimitar 6y ago
        True. Right now I could only buy an RTX 3090 for 3100 EUR (~3740 USD) and I am not willing to pay that much. But I am happy to wait. Upgrading my gaming machine is a very low prio.
- bayindirh 6y ago
  My primary desktop is a 3770K running Linux. That CPU's the unexpected beast. Just churning through what you throw at it with incredible speed even for today. I process RAW photos, encode some audio and develop high performance scientific software on it (testing it lowers my heating bills, somewhat). I want to try one of the new Ryzen CPUs, but I have no reason to upgrade.
nemacol 6y ago
I built my own gaming pc back in Nov 2010 with an i7-970 24g ram. While I have upgraded the GPU twice and upgraded to larger SSD's as prices have come down, I am still using the same machine for gaming. Not that what I am doing is very intense or hardcore intense graphics. I can comfortably play all the Blizzard titles, modern FPS like whatever COD is newest, etc. Maybe not on max settings anymore. Still, I am impressed by how much I have gotten out of my machine.
stjohnswarts 6y ago
Yep and take computer from 2001 and run it in 2011, you wouldn't have been nearly as happy with the performance. There have been incremental upgrades but mostly just the core count which is great for handling server stuff but not nearly as noticeable as Hz counts increases
- brewdad 6y ago
  The other main improvement in the past 10 years is the power draw. You can get more than 10 hours of battery life in a machine that weighs less than 3 lbs. That would have been unthinkable a decade ago. CPU improvements are only part of the story in making that happen but the are certainly far ahead of where things were in the not so distant past.
  - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
    10 hour battery life was achievable 15 years ago on Pentium M provided you under-volted, under-clocked, and had a high capacity battery.
    - edvinbesic 6y ago
      How far does this goalpost go?
      - kevin_thibedeau 6y ago
        The point is that the technology for long life laptops has been ready for a long time. It's just that Intel marketing calls all the shots and they only wanted to sell multicore space heaters with space heater memory to sweeten the deal. With this burden on chipset side, it was impossible to compensate with extra amp hours and maintain portable weight.
        rualca 6y ago
        > The point is that the technology for long life laptops has been ready for a long time. You're desperately moving the goal post to ridiculous places. It's like claiming that walking on the moon is supposed to be considered normal just because the technology has been ready for a long time. That claim is irrelevant, isn't it? I mean, what good does a "technically it's possible" claim do if a) no, it's clearly not possible outside exceptionally rare circumstances b) the average consumer device is way behind any of those outlandish claims.
kitsunesoba 6y ago
If it weren’t for the fact that it’s not good at being a laptop (chunky, heavy, hot), I’d be perfectly happy using my old QX9300 (Core 2 Quad) workstation laptop for day to day. With an SSD and the Bluetooth+Wifi upgraded to Intel AX200 it’s only marginally slower than my newer x86 boxes at most things, and its 15.4” 1920x1200 display is still nicer than what ships on a lot of laptops today. Wouldn’t want to use it as a dev machine, but any less demanding usage would be fine.
KozmoNau7 6y ago
My desktop is 2010 vintage 6-core Phenom II 1100T with 16GB RAM, the motherboard is officially maxed out, but I've been told it can take 32GB just fine. It has been upgraded with an SSD and more recently a Radeon RX560, and it really does everything I need. Newer games do need lower settings, but it'll motor through most games at 720p. I added a PCIe USB-C interface card, so I'm not even stuck at USB 2.0 anymore. I have considered replacing it with something smaller, now that all of my files are on a NAS and I don't need room for 5-6 drives in this machine. But I just don't feel like I would be getting enough of an improvement over what I already have, even with hefty new parts. My laptop is a 2011 vintage X220i, and that is starting to feel a little bit behind, mostly thanks to the i3 inside. But it connects to 5GHz WiFi and is fast enough for browsing and video playback, so for now it keeps on truckin'. Actually the best upgrade would be a decently powerful 12-14" laptop paired with an eGPU dock. That setup would handily replace both machines, but eGPUs just aren't a mature configuration yet, especially combined with Linux. Maybe in a few years.
- top_kekeroni_m8 5y ago
  Gaming at 720p in 2021? Oh come on, you really need to try some 1440p/144hz gaming ;)
BeFlatXIII 6y ago
There is only one other popular task that a decade-old CPU can’t handle acceptably well: running a web browser. Outside of that, computers have been good enough ever since HiDPI/Retina screens became standard.
ska 6y ago
> I bought in January 2011 is still completely serviceable for pretty Isn't this essentially what Apple's observation was (and hence their spec choices)?
brailsafe 6y ago
Which computer are you referring to?
neycoda 6y ago
I have a quad core i7 from 2013 and the laptop still runs just as fast. I had to replace the hard drive and the RAM is maxed at 16GB (not good for virtualization), but it runs like new except for some odd screen recording hiccups with Microsoft's Xbox thing, but really all of the performance problems seem to just be driver bugs in relation to Dell's way of doing things.

jean_tta 6y ago

Most people have no need to compare CPUs between mobile/non mobile or generation. They just need to know if the laptop they're looking at has the high end / middle end / low end CPU. You'd be comparing a new laptop with latest(-ish) CPUs. The i3/i5/i7 makes it plain & simple to know that. You don't need to figure out what the "middle end" CPU is called this year. It's the i5, problem solved.

caslon 6y ago
You can't forget that there are multiple variants of i3, i5 and i7 every year! And presumably now the i9 but I haven't been paying attention. 6400 6500 6600 6600k random assortment of numbers and letters! It hardly works! The consumer still has to do just as much work!
- kijin 6y ago
  It's even worse these days. There are letters in the middle of the model name, e.g. i7-1165G7, not just at the beginning and end! That thing doesn't even sort. You have no idea where to position it without seeing the spec sheet and Passmark scores. We consumers have it easy, though. Go find some Xeon or EPYC model numbers and try to figure out which digit means what. They make absolutely no sense.
  - Dylan16807 5y ago
    > You have no idea where to position it without seeing the spec sheet and Passmark scores. You can probably get pretty far by adding the 3/5/7 to the generation number and sorting by the sum.
jrumbut 6y ago
This definitely feels like an engineer's approach to marketing.
klelatti 6y ago
The decision that people think about most is when to upgrade (by definition it stretches over a longer time period than the single point purchasing decision). That's why we have iPhone 7/8/9...13 and similarly for Samsung etc. If your i3/i5/i7 designation gives no clues then that's not helpful.

numlock86 6y ago

> I think that is because the performance has been the same for the past 10+ years. Ah yes, the exaggerated funny phrase. On a serious note, the performance difference from an i7 7th generation (7700k) to an i7 10th generation (10700k) felt quite impressive.

onli 6y ago
Not a surprise. Stronger cores and double the cores and threads. And that's not a theoretical difference, they had a performance uptick of up to 100% even in games [0]. [0]: https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%5B%5D=Intel+Core+i7-10700K&ids%5B%5D=Intel+Core+i7-7700K https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%...
- DCKing 6y ago
  The 7700K and 10700K use virtually the same Skylake architecture cores with very minor tweaks between them. The only CPU performance gains Intel made in the 2015-2020 period were clock speeds, core counts and support for higher memory speeds. The 7700K and 10700K even share the same integrated graphics architecture.
  - onli 6y ago
    I think that's correct. But it is all true at the same time. The cores are stronger because of the higher clock they can achieve and how the turbo clock works, and the higher core count does make a big difference. Higher memory speed also helps (though the difference in practice on Z board should be just a matter of what was typically on the market). Intel UHD 630 is even usually a tiny bit faster than the Intel HD 630, even if that's also only from the clock difference - only now with the UHD 730 and 750 did they improve things there.

FpUser 6y ago

Not really. I had this exact case when modern i7 laptop had kicked the butt of my 10 year old desktop speed wise at the same number of cores. Not sure how's this trend would go when started now though.

makomk 6y ago

The overall performance of Intel's range of processors may not have changed much, but what they called an i3, i5 or i7 sure has lately. For example, the popular i7-7700k is most similar in terms of core count, clocks etc to the current i3 chips, and I don't think there was any real equivalent to the current i5 or i7 chips back then. If I remember rightly, the generations prior to that were still seeing actual performance improvements generation-on-generation too.

eloff 6y ago

The performance difference between i7s of 10 years ago versus today is more than 2x per core, and the number of cores have also more than doubled in that time period. That's over a 4x performance difference in 10 years, it's not quite the good old days of Moore's law, but it's still an exponential improvement.

StrictDabbler 6y ago
That sounds like an S-curve, not an exponential improvement. You can make any monotonically increasing function look exponential if you only have two points (f(n+x)/f(n)) and you get to pick both n and X. "It doubled over the past fifty years!" If looking at all the points shows the time it takes to double is way longer than it used to be you're probably on the top of the S. Which, ok, we know we're headed to an S-curve instead. There are limitations on what we can do on silicon, right? It's just that the CISC/Intel S-curve is way lower than the ARM/M1 S-curve. Intel got used to leaving a margin of performance sitting on the table because it'll be faster next year. They got lazy. As chip gains have slowed those margins have started to add up.

pjmlp 6y ago

This laptop from 2009, a core duo, has been maxed out to 8 GB and one 1 TB SSD disk, and running the latest W10 Pro version. I still do C++, .NET and Java programming on it just fine, use Office, Adobe software, and it is docker free.