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> I’d like to thank Intel here for making this possible. The CPU innovation stagnation between 2012-2017 has resulted in 4 cores still being an acceptable low-e

by Shorel 5y ago

> I’d like to thank Intel here for making this possible. The CPU innovation stagnation between 2012-2017 has resulted in 4 cores still being an acceptable low-end CPU in early 2022. Without this, my laptop would likely be obsolete by now. Hahaha, this last sentence seals the overall tone of the article.

MR4D 5y ago
This. Last January I converted my old (2012) quad-core Intel desktop and gave it to my son for gaming. The only thing I had to do was add a 1-TB SSD and put in an RTX-3060 Ti, and it runs every game (Fortnite, CoD, etc) at 100+ FPS without any issues. I'm still amazed that a simple GPU change and the machine keeps up with his friends brand-new AMD box (not sure what chip, just that it was new in 2021). When the 12th generation intel chips came out last month, it was the first time I felt good about the future for chips. (Yes, I know AMD has been kicking their butt, but that's been in core count and power, which aren't as relevant for my son's gaming.)
- unethical_ban 5y ago
  What other metrics are there for a processor in gaming, if not (compute) power per core, as well as core count? Sure, a gaming computer doesn't need 8 cores as much as an encoder, but AMD's single core performance is right up there with Intel, for much less money. Disclaimer: AMD fanboy and stockholder
  - MR4D 5y ago
    I was using power to mean electricity, not compute power. Thanks for noticing that ambiguity. As for your comment about core usage in games, I'm still surprised how few cores it takes, even for modern games. Not my knowledge area at all, so all of that part of gaming and computing architecture is a bit opaque to me.
- terminalcommand 5y ago
  Was it a Xeon processor :)?
  - MR4D 5y ago
    Ha - it actually is!!!! This is too funny - I was about to reply to you, and then decided to check my files. Lo and behold, I found that when I bought the components in March 2012, I bought an Intel E5-2609 (which is indeed a Xeon!) for $299. Had I not looked, I never would have guessed. Thinking about it now (and I might be wrong), the machine has 32GB of RAM, so I might have bought the Xeon to go above 16GB. Can anyone confirm if that would have made sense at the time (or if my memory is just fuzzy?) ? Chip details here: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/64588/intel-xeon-processor-e52609-10m-cache-2-40-ghz-6-40-gts-intel-qpi.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/64588/i...
    - terminalcommand 5y ago
      Second hand PC dealers in my country (Turkey) used to put together affordable gaming rigs using old Xeon processors a couple of years back. That's why my first guess was that if it was a Xeon. I think Xeon processors also have special motherboards, so you can put TWO processors on some of them. That was a huge selling point for computer nerds like me. Wikipedia says "Because of a hardware limitation not fixed until Ivy Bridge-E in 2013, most older Intel CPUs only support up to 4 gibibit chips for 8 GiB DIMMs". The E5-2609 is at the generation of sandy bridge. So you probably bought the Xeon to support 32GB :).
- mikepurvis 5y ago
  My wife has been gaming on a fourth-gen i5 + RX 570 for a few months, and it was mostly fine until Halo Infinite— with that title it was pretty clear that she was CPU bound, with the system chugging on open areas, mob AI, particles, etc. We upgraded her to a second hand B450 mobo + Ryzen 2400 and that's been fine. Still running on low settings due to the limited GPU, but everything is at least playable. And this motherboard has FW updates that support 5xxx series Ryzens, so there's upgrade headroom there now as well.
  - my_usernam3 5y ago
    Don't upgrade for Halo Infinite. That game also turned my otherwise fine machine into a potato. I've since fixed the issue by not playing halo and playing splitgate instead.
    - testudovictoria 5y ago
      I have plenty of time in both Halo Infinite and Splitgate. Even if you take away the portals, Splitgate doesn't play like Halo Infinite at all. They look and sound similar, but they play and feel very different.
- stremrn8 5y ago
- devwastaken 5y ago
  The Ryzen 5600X is the gaming CPU of this gen outside of the lower budget Intel chips. Ryzen didn't just win on core count they won in single thread too because competing Intel chips are 120W, which limits their performance on stock cooling. The 5600X is 76W actual.
  - terafo 5y ago
    It was. Now there's 12400F which offers just slightly lower performance(few percent slower) at almost half of the price. And there's 12600k which at the same price offers slightly better performance in gaming than 5600x, but in multithreaded workloads often outperforms 5800x.
    - dijit 5y ago
      that chip can suck down 150W of cooling (which is likely the cooling setup that benchmarks will be running with). Not going to argue semantics here, but the grandparents point was that cooling the intel chips tends to be where it falls down (thus, the real world may differ significantly), even if there are paper gains in game benchmarks. Offering a chip which takes double the cooling is just leaning into their point.
      - gigel82 5y ago
        It's not just the cooling, it's power usage in general, that's how Intel moved ahead with this generation... 12600K is using 224W compared with 5600X's 134W during the same test (SuperPi stress test where 12600K scored worse at 389s vs. 5600X's 380s). Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that the competition is heating up again, that can only be good news for consumers. But sucking more power to deliver perf gains is totally the wrong direction for this.
      - zamadatix 5y ago
        Game performance, and cooling in general outside of a very specific use case, isn't affected by what the marketing department of Intel says the 10 core AVX wattage of the 12600k is being compared to what the marketing department of AMD says the 6 core AVX wattage of the 5600X is. When a single core is maxed out the real world measured difference is roughly 12 watts between the two and remember the 12600k is doing slightly more per second than the 5600X. If your gaming device of choice is a laptop that'd be interesting but both are desktop gaming CPUs. If 24/7 all core workload power efficiency is your concern I'd steer you away from either gaming optimized option. I really like what AMD has done, my last 2 desktop CPUs have been a 3900X and a 5950X, but if I were to buy a entry level gaming CPU right now the 12600k would be very interesting regardless what the all core AVX thermals look like on a stock cooler.
- salamandersauce 5y ago
  In more CPU demanding games it will start running into trouble. Even on a single-threaded performance level a Ryzen 5600X is about twice as fast as a Core i5-2500k from 2012.
tombert 5y ago
Yeah, so something I used to do was buy used servers from ~2010 or so (5-6 years old at the time). Due to the fact that CPUs really haven't changed a lot for servers (at least for the stuff I was doing), it was a relatively cheap way to get 40+ core computers for less than a thousand bucks.
- jagger27 5y ago
  If it weren’t for the cumbersome and outdated iDRACs and ILOs of those old servers they’d still be perfectly usable for lots of things. If you don’t need out of band management it’s probably best to ignore them as much as possible. I used a PCIe to M.2 NVMe adapter and an EFI shim so that my Dell R820 could boot from it (which is not supported by the BIOS). Stuff like that adds a ton of life to older systems. I still got rid of it because it was too loud and power hungry for what I was doing. Surprisingly, I was able to sell it for roughly what I paid for it over a year later. 32 cores and 192GB of RAM for under a grand is pretty incredible.
  - tombert 5y ago
    > I still got rid of it because it was loud and power hungry. Same! I loved my 48 core server, but there was actually a glitch in the Con Edison system where I ended up getting free power for two years [1], and once they fixed it and I got a power bill email for almost $900 while I was at work, I called my wife and said "UNPLUG THE SERVER NOW. RUN, DON'T WALK!" [1] To be clear, I didn't know there was a glitch, I just thought power was cheaper in that apartment. I'm not greedy, I'm just dumb.
    - quickthrowman 5y ago
      $900 for a month? That seems excessive. 720 hrs * 1.8 kW = 1296 kWh. 1800w is a maxed out 120v 20A circuit. I pay about $0.10 per kWh, that’s $129.60 for a month.
      - tombert 5y ago
        Well, $900 was the total power bill. I also had one window units running in that room, and another window unit running in my bedroom, and I also actually had an Apple XServe running that I was using as a media server. I think what caused such a catastrophic power bill was the surge pricing in NYC that happens in the summer, and the servers pumping out a ton of heat, forcing the AC's to run harder and longer.
emptybottle 5y ago
What's hilarious to me is that Apple considers their own computers of this era to be "vintage" No joke, that's the real term https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624 "About vintage products. -- Products are considered vintage when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 5 and less than 7 years ago." Well, not much has changed on the intel side in that timeframe. My 2013 laptop is still getting OS updates and performs fine for my needs. And now I can brag that I'm running a vintage computer as my daily driver.
- selectodude 5y ago
  Vintage is a technical term for "we don't stock parts to repair these anymore" not "they're unusable and you should throw it out".
  - disqard 5y ago
    s/technical/marketing/g
    - mattl 5y ago
      Possibly legal. I heard a story that the original Apple II machines came with a warranty that had no expiration and that California residents who purchased a machine in California are still entitled to hardware support on the machine.
  - iak8god 5y ago
    Right, Apple specifically calls those "obsolete": > About obsolete products > Products are considered obsolete when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 7 years ago.
- cobaltoxide 5y ago
  Planned obsolescence is Apple's bread and butter.
  - 5y ago
NikolaNovak 5y ago
Indeed. Not only are my ThinkPad T420s still usable around home (see another post here), but my AMD FX-8350, approaching a decade, is still going strong as my primary (gaming, photo editing, etc) desktop.
drewzero1 5y ago
I went back to a 2008 R-series several years ago after having some newer laptops fail on me. I still had it and it kept working, so I kept using it. Last year I finally decided I needed a trackpad so I upgraded to a W500 (2009) which if you squint is the same computer with everything upgraded slightly. It's low-end, but it can still do a lot of work and even load Facebook or recipe sites if necessary. Overall, I've found that even in 2021 a Core 2 Duo can still be a sufficient low-end CPU. Thanks Intel!

by Shorel 5y ago

MR4D 5y ago

This. Last January I converted my old (2012) quad-core Intel desktop and gave it to my son for gaming. The only thing I had to do was add a 1-TB SSD and put in an RTX-3060 Ti, and it runs every game (Fortnite, CoD, etc) at 100+ FPS without any issues. I'm still amazed that a simple GPU change and the machine keeps up with his friends brand-new AMD box (not sure what chip, just that it was new in 2021). When the 12th generation intel chips came out last month, it was the first time I felt good about the future for chips. (Yes, I know AMD has been kicking their butt, but that's been in core count and power, which aren't as relevant for my son's gaming.)

unethical_ban 5y ago
What other metrics are there for a processor in gaming, if not (compute) power per core, as well as core count? Sure, a gaming computer doesn't need 8 cores as much as an encoder, but AMD's single core performance is right up there with Intel, for much less money. Disclaimer: AMD fanboy and stockholder
- MR4D 5y ago
  I was using power to mean electricity, not compute power. Thanks for noticing that ambiguity. As for your comment about core usage in games, I'm still surprised how few cores it takes, even for modern games. Not my knowledge area at all, so all of that part of gaming and computing architecture is a bit opaque to me.
terminalcommand 5y ago
Was it a Xeon processor :)?
- MR4D 5y ago
  Ha - it actually is!!!! This is too funny - I was about to reply to you, and then decided to check my files. Lo and behold, I found that when I bought the components in March 2012, I bought an Intel E5-2609 (which is indeed a Xeon!) for $299. Had I not looked, I never would have guessed. Thinking about it now (and I might be wrong), the machine has 32GB of RAM, so I might have bought the Xeon to go above 16GB. Can anyone confirm if that would have made sense at the time (or if my memory is just fuzzy?) ? Chip details here: https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/64588/intel-xeon-processor-e52609-10m-cache-2-40-ghz-6-40-gts-intel-qpi.html https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/64588/i...
  - terminalcommand 5y ago
    Second hand PC dealers in my country (Turkey) used to put together affordable gaming rigs using old Xeon processors a couple of years back. That's why my first guess was that if it was a Xeon. I think Xeon processors also have special motherboards, so you can put TWO processors on some of them. That was a huge selling point for computer nerds like me. Wikipedia says "Because of a hardware limitation not fixed until Ivy Bridge-E in 2013, most older Intel CPUs only support up to 4 gibibit chips for 8 GiB DIMMs". The E5-2609 is at the generation of sandy bridge. So you probably bought the Xeon to support 32GB :).
mikepurvis 5y ago
My wife has been gaming on a fourth-gen i5 + RX 570 for a few months, and it was mostly fine until Halo Infinite— with that title it was pretty clear that she was CPU bound, with the system chugging on open areas, mob AI, particles, etc. We upgraded her to a second hand B450 mobo + Ryzen 2400 and that's been fine. Still running on low settings due to the limited GPU, but everything is at least playable. And this motherboard has FW updates that support 5xxx series Ryzens, so there's upgrade headroom there now as well.
- my_usernam3 5y ago
  Don't upgrade for Halo Infinite. That game also turned my otherwise fine machine into a potato. I've since fixed the issue by not playing halo and playing splitgate instead.
  - testudovictoria 5y ago
    I have plenty of time in both Halo Infinite and Splitgate. Even if you take away the portals, Splitgate doesn't play like Halo Infinite at all. They look and sound similar, but they play and feel very different.
stremrn8 5y ago
devwastaken 5y ago
The Ryzen 5600X is the gaming CPU of this gen outside of the lower budget Intel chips. Ryzen didn't just win on core count they won in single thread too because competing Intel chips are 120W, which limits their performance on stock cooling. The 5600X is 76W actual.
- terafo 5y ago
  It was. Now there's 12400F which offers just slightly lower performance(few percent slower) at almost half of the price. And there's 12600k which at the same price offers slightly better performance in gaming than 5600x, but in multithreaded workloads often outperforms 5800x.
  - dijit 5y ago
    that chip can suck down 150W of cooling (which is likely the cooling setup that benchmarks will be running with). Not going to argue semantics here, but the grandparents point was that cooling the intel chips tends to be where it falls down (thus, the real world may differ significantly), even if there are paper gains in game benchmarks. Offering a chip which takes double the cooling is just leaning into their point.
    - gigel82 5y ago
      It's not just the cooling, it's power usage in general, that's how Intel moved ahead with this generation... 12600K is using 224W compared with 5600X's 134W during the same test (SuperPi stress test where 12600K scored worse at 389s vs. 5600X's 380s). Don't get me wrong, I appreciate that the competition is heating up again, that can only be good news for consumers. But sucking more power to deliver perf gains is totally the wrong direction for this.
    - zamadatix 5y ago
      Game performance, and cooling in general outside of a very specific use case, isn't affected by what the marketing department of Intel says the 10 core AVX wattage of the 12600k is being compared to what the marketing department of AMD says the 6 core AVX wattage of the 5600X is. When a single core is maxed out the real world measured difference is roughly 12 watts between the two and remember the 12600k is doing slightly more per second than the 5600X. If your gaming device of choice is a laptop that'd be interesting but both are desktop gaming CPUs. If 24/7 all core workload power efficiency is your concern I'd steer you away from either gaming optimized option. I really like what AMD has done, my last 2 desktop CPUs have been a 3900X and a 5950X, but if I were to buy a entry level gaming CPU right now the 12600k would be very interesting regardless what the all core AVX thermals look like on a stock cooler.
salamandersauce 5y ago
In more CPU demanding games it will start running into trouble. Even on a single-threaded performance level a Ryzen 5600X is about twice as fast as a Core i5-2500k from 2012.

tombert 5y ago

Yeah, so something I used to do was buy used servers from ~2010 or so (5-6 years old at the time). Due to the fact that CPUs really haven't changed a lot for servers (at least for the stuff I was doing), it was a relatively cheap way to get 40+ core computers for less than a thousand bucks.

jagger27 5y ago
If it weren’t for the cumbersome and outdated iDRACs and ILOs of those old servers they’d still be perfectly usable for lots of things. If you don’t need out of band management it’s probably best to ignore them as much as possible. I used a PCIe to M.2 NVMe adapter and an EFI shim so that my Dell R820 could boot from it (which is not supported by the BIOS). Stuff like that adds a ton of life to older systems. I still got rid of it because it was too loud and power hungry for what I was doing. Surprisingly, I was able to sell it for roughly what I paid for it over a year later. 32 cores and 192GB of RAM for under a grand is pretty incredible.
- tombert 5y ago
  > I still got rid of it because it was loud and power hungry. Same! I loved my 48 core server, but there was actually a glitch in the Con Edison system where I ended up getting free power for two years [1], and once they fixed it and I got a power bill email for almost $900 while I was at work, I called my wife and said "UNPLUG THE SERVER NOW. RUN, DON'T WALK!" [1] To be clear, I didn't know there was a glitch, I just thought power was cheaper in that apartment. I'm not greedy, I'm just dumb.
  - quickthrowman 5y ago
    $900 for a month? That seems excessive. 720 hrs * 1.8 kW = 1296 kWh. 1800w is a maxed out 120v 20A circuit. I pay about $0.10 per kWh, that’s $129.60 for a month.
    - tombert 5y ago
      Well, $900 was the total power bill. I also had one window units running in that room, and another window unit running in my bedroom, and I also actually had an Apple XServe running that I was using as a media server. I think what caused such a catastrophic power bill was the surge pricing in NYC that happens in the summer, and the servers pumping out a ton of heat, forcing the AC's to run harder and longer.

emptybottle 5y ago

What's hilarious to me is that Apple considers their own computers of this era to be "vintage" No joke, that's the real term https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624 https://support.apple.com/en-us/HT201624 "About vintage products. -- Products are considered vintage when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 5 and less than 7 years ago." Well, not much has changed on the intel side in that timeframe. My 2013 laptop is still getting OS updates and performs fine for my needs. And now I can brag that I'm running a vintage computer as my daily driver.

selectodude 5y ago
Vintage is a technical term for "we don't stock parts to repair these anymore" not "they're unusable and you should throw it out".
- disqard 5y ago
  s/technical/marketing/g
  - mattl 5y ago
    Possibly legal. I heard a story that the original Apple II machines came with a warranty that had no expiration and that California residents who purchased a machine in California are still entitled to hardware support on the machine.
- iak8god 5y ago
  Right, Apple specifically calls those "obsolete": > About obsolete products > Products are considered obsolete when Apple stopped distributing them for sale more than 7 years ago.
cobaltoxide 5y ago
Planned obsolescence is Apple's bread and butter.
- 5y ago

NikolaNovak 5y ago

Indeed. Not only are my ThinkPad T420s still usable around home (see another post here), but my AMD FX-8350, approaching a decade, is still going strong as my primary (gaming, photo editing, etc) desktop.

drewzero1 5y ago

I went back to a 2008 R-series several years ago after having some newer laptops fail on me. I still had it and it kept working, so I kept using it. Last year I finally decided I needed a trackpad so I upgraded to a W500 (2009) which if you squint is the same computer with everything upgraded slightly. It's low-end, but it can still do a lot of work and even load Facebook or recipe sites if necessary. Overall, I've found that even in 2021 a Core 2 Duo can still be a sufficient low-end CPU. Thanks Intel!