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That's the thing most people don't get about Intel: nothing has really changed perf-wise since Haswell, which is older than that. If your old Haswell / Skylake
by m0zg 5y ago
That's the thing most people don't get about Intel: nothing has really changed perf-wise since Haswell, which is older than that.
If your old Haswell / Skylake machines still work (and if you don't need Windows 11 which doesn't support them), there's zero technical reason to upgrade to something newer, at least on the desktop.
There's been some progress in terms of power efficiency on laptops, but even there 5+ year old chips are pretty much as good as it gets if you want to stick to Intel. Maybe 10-15% percent slower than the very latest stuff, you won't even notice it. That's why Apple is currently obliterating Intel and AMD - the latter milked their cash cow until it fell over.
And Apple knew that they didn't even need to work particularly hard on core perf - memory bandwidth improvements alone would have delivered the goods. That's another thing people don't get - the CPUs spend quite a bit of their time waiting for bytes to come in or go out. The latencies involved in that are upwards of 200 cycles, and any significant improvement in both the latency and the bandwidth has insane, immediately noticeable benefits for perf, particularly in "modern" languages with poor cache locality. Why Intel / AMD duopoly did so little to address this deficiency is inexplicable, but here we are.
- KennyBlanken 5y ago> That's the thing most people don't get about Intel: nothing has really changed perf-wise since Haswell, which is older than that. Single core performance on current i9 processors benchmarks at twice the performance of the Haswell chips. Multicore performance is ~4x. They definitely slept for a while and AMD started taking their lunch money with Ryzen and EPYC but "nothing has really changed since Haswell" is blatantly wrong. > If your old Haswell / Skylake machines still work (and if you don't need Windows 11 which doesn't support them), there's zero technical reason to upgrade to something newer, at least on the desktop. Wrong again, mostly because quicksync in that old a processor won't handle current popular streaming video codecs so you end up with non-accelerated video decoding unless you've got a discrete GPU. > memory bandwidth improvements alone would have delivered the goods. No advantage from people upgrading from a Haswell's DDR3-1600 (13GB/sec) to Comet Lake's DDR4-2933 (94GB/sec), eh? Either it's not worth upgrading from Haswell or it is.
- m0zg 5y agoI'm sure that's what Intel would like you to believe. But if you benchmark this stuff (which I have) you will see that real world single core perf hasn't moved much in a decade, and memory bandwidth is never "94GB/sec" or whatever, especially not in a laptop.