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A lot of the performance gains of the past 10 years aren't obvious from the headline specs. The desktop PC I built in 2015 for £1082.98 i7-4790K (4 cores, "

A lot of the performance gains of the past 10 years aren't obvious from the headline specs. The desktop PC I built in 2015 for £1082.98 i7-4790K (4 cores, "4.00 GHz base 4.40 GHz Turbo") 32GB DDR3 RAM Samsung 250GB SSD nvidia GTX 960 2GB GPU The desktop PC Dell will sell me, today, for £1,174.80 [1] i7-14700 (8 performance cores, 12 efficient cores, "2.1 GHz Base, 5.4 GHz Turbo") 32GB DDR5 RAM 512 GB SSD Intel Integrated Graphics Sure, it's better. But on paper those spec changes don't look game-changing, considering it's been an entire decade. Especially if you're mistrustful of efficiency cores. But what those headline specs don't mention is that the RAM is 4x faster, the SSD is now nvme and faster, the pcie lanes are 4x faster, and the CPU cache has quadrupled. [1] https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/desktop-computers/new-optiplex-micro-form-factor/spd/optiplex-7020-plus-micro/s010o7020mffp_vp https://www.dell.com/en-uk/shop/desktop-computers/new-optipl...

adgjlsfhk1 2y ago
The other big difference is if you are comparing DIY vs DIY, you can now get a 2TB SSD for $100 which is pretty great compared to a decade ago.
- BearOso 2y ago
  A good 2TB TLC NVMe 4.0 drive went for 100 USD when the prices bottomed out, but Samsung and friends cut the supply. You can get 2TB for cheap now, but those are DRAM-less QLC drives. I suggest paying an extra 30-50 USD to get one with the TLC and RAM.
jeffbee 2y ago
On paper those specs definitely look game-changing to me. The newer one has three of the older CPUs on the side, for free. The i9 is even more ridiculous, having what amounts to 4 quad-core Skylake CPUs as coprocessors (efficiency cores, in the parlance). But people are underestimating the compound effect of 10 years of 15% generational improvements. The CPUs in the article will run your web browser 4x faster than the older CPU you mentioned, about 2x faster than a Ryzen 5 5500 that is only 2 years old.
- michaelt 2y ago
  > On paper those specs definitely look game-changing to me. The reality is that the newer processor is better in all benchmarks. Like 4-5x on the benchmarks I looked up, yes. But back in the day, the 'turbo' frequency was only available for a few seconds for thermal and power reasons, and the 'base' clock speed was how it would actually perform on big, compute-intensive tasks. If you only consider "8 performance cores, 2.1 GHz Base" vs "4 cores, 4.0 GHz base" and you also discount the 'efficiency cores', a person might think performance had barely changed.
imtringued 2y ago
Those are the specs you'd expect from a $500 mini PC. Step up to $700 and you will get a better CPU plus 2TB nvme SSD. https://www.geekom.de/geekom-a5-mini-pc/ https://www.geekom.de/geekom-a5-mini-pc/
re-thc 2y ago
> Sure, it's better. Which 1? The 1 that's 13-14th gen and isn't getting recalled?
torginus 2y ago
Well, if you accept an asspull reasoning, you could guess a typical task consists of equal parts non-cpu dependent work (disk, network), which hasn't gotten faster, single threaded work, which is allegedly twice as fast, and parallelizable work, which I assume to be infinitely fast. That gives us a timing of 1/3*(1+0.5+0) which is a 2x speedup, with the maximum achievable compared to the baseline being 3x. So no, you are right, your computer probably isn't that much faster in practice.

adgjlsfhk1 2y ago

The other big difference is if you are comparing DIY vs DIY, you can now get a 2TB SSD for $100 which is pretty great compared to a decade ago.

BearOso 2y ago
A good 2TB TLC NVMe 4.0 drive went for 100 USD when the prices bottomed out, but Samsung and friends cut the supply. You can get 2TB for cheap now, but those are DRAM-less QLC drives. I suggest paying an extra 30-50 USD to get one with the TLC and RAM.

jeffbee 2y ago

On paper those specs definitely look game-changing to me. The newer one has three of the older CPUs on the side, for free. The i9 is even more ridiculous, having what amounts to 4 quad-core Skylake CPUs as coprocessors (efficiency cores, in the parlance). But people are underestimating the compound effect of 10 years of 15% generational improvements. The CPUs in the article will run your web browser 4x faster than the older CPU you mentioned, about 2x faster than a Ryzen 5 5500 that is only 2 years old.

michaelt 2y ago
> On paper those specs definitely look game-changing to me. The reality is that the newer processor is better in all benchmarks. Like 4-5x on the benchmarks I looked up, yes. But back in the day, the 'turbo' frequency was only available for a few seconds for thermal and power reasons, and the 'base' clock speed was how it would actually perform on big, compute-intensive tasks. If you only consider "8 performance cores, 2.1 GHz Base" vs "4 cores, 4.0 GHz base" and you also discount the 'efficiency cores', a person might think performance had barely changed.

imtringued 2y ago

Those are the specs you'd expect from a $500 mini PC. Step up to $700 and you will get a better CPU plus 2TB nvme SSD. https://www.geekom.de/geekom-a5-mini-pc/ https://www.geekom.de/geekom-a5-mini-pc/

re-thc 2y ago

> Sure, it's better. Which 1? The 1 that's 13-14th gen and isn't getting recalled?

torginus 2y ago

Well, if you accept an asspull reasoning, you could guess a typical task consists of equal parts non-cpu dependent work (disk, network), which hasn't gotten faster, single threaded work, which is allegedly twice as fast, and parallelizable work, which I assume to be infinitely fast. That gives us a timing of 1/3*(1+0.5+0) which is a 2x speedup, with the maximum achievable compared to the baseline being 3x. So no, you are right, your computer probably isn't that much faster in practice.