10 Years of Intel Processors Compared 98
jjslash writes to Techspot's interesting look back at the evolution of Intel CPUs since the original Core 2 Duo E6600 and Core 2 Quad processors were introduced. The test pits the eight-year-old CPUs against their successors in the Nehalem, Sandy Bridge and Haswell families, including today's Celeron and Pentium parts which fare comparably well. A great reference just days before Intel's new Skylake processor debuts.
I'll play. (Score:1)
Nought better to do
Than post this drivel each day--
What are you, 14?
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Stop replying to trolls.
Different instruction sets (Score:1)
I wish they also made benchmarks that only use a common base instruction set (SSE2/3), because most of the newer processor superiority probably comes from ISA extensions.
Re:Different instruction sets (Score:4, Interesting)
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Because what the pessimist in me is seeing, isn't a cherrypicked 11 x increase in one bench but overall core performance stagnation.
Well, you can't say you weren't warned; there have been about a zillion articles along the lines of "everybody better learn how to multithread, because we've hit the wall on single-core performance and the only way to make use of extra transistors now is to add more cores".
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because most of the newer processor superiority probably comes from ISA extensions.
Unlikely since most newer computers don't even support PCI.
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Unlikely since most newer computers don't even support PCI.
Obviously you were just trying to be clever, but this is a lot of bollocks. Even many machines which don't have any PCI bus connectors have a PCI bus...
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Why would you want to run a benchmark that deliberately cripples your processor by not using new features?
That's like benchmarking your CPU while running at half the clock speed.
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Because a lot of programs don't use those features because they are compiled to run on a wide variety of hardware.
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And how many of those programs are computing intensive? And how many of the computing intensive ones don't use libraries for some or all of the intensive parts? A lot of of software that is cpu bound got the message years ago that there are newer technologies and it is worth having more than one code path to take advantage of newer cpus or gpus or using a library that does that for you.
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It wouldn't be a meaningful test then, would it? Hey let's race these cars, but since the old ones don't have turbos, let's disable the turbos in the new ones too.
Re: Different instruction sets (Score:1)
Depends on what you're looking for.
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That's the whole point! (Score:1)
They got better because they improved the ISA. That's why you want a new one. Taking that out would be basically saying "let's take away all the new features that were added and see if it's as good." The answer wouldn't be very interesting.
Re:Different instruction sets (Score:5, Informative)
Benchmarks are hard for comparing computing systems already. Design trade-offs are made all the time. As the nature of the software these systems run change over the time, so does the processor design changes to meet these changes. With more software taking advantage of the GPU there may be less effort in making your CPU handle floating points faster, so you can focus more on making integer math faster, or better threading...
2005 compared to 2015...
2005 - Desktop computing was King! Every user needed a Desktop/Laptop computer for basic computing needs.
2015 - Desktop is for business. Mobile system Smart Phones/Tablets are used for basic computing needs, the Desktop is reserved for more serious work.
2005 - Beginning of buzzword "Web 2.0" or the acceptance of JavaScript in browsers. Shortly before that most pages had nearly no JavaScript in they pages, if they were it was more for being a toy, at best data validation in a form. CSS features were also used in a very basic form. Browsers were still having problems with following the standards.
2015 - "Web 2.0" is so ingrained that we don't call it that anymore. Browsers have more or less settled down and started following the open standards, And JavaScript powers a good portion of the pages Display. the the N Tier type of environment it has became a top level User Interface Tier. Even with all the Slashdot upgrade hate. Most of us barely remember. clicking the Reply link, having to load a new page to enter in your text. And then the page would reload when you are done.
2005 - 32 bit was still the norm. Most software was in 32 bit, and you still needed compatibility for 16 bit apps.
2015 - 64 bit is finally here. There is legacy support for 32 bit, but finally 16bit is out.
These changes in how computing is used over the time, means processor design has to reweigh its tradeoffs it choose in previous systems, and move things around. Overall things are getting faster, but any one feature may not see an improvement or it may even regress.
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Boring (Score:4, Insightful)
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You're right. More interesting would be a comparison of Intel's benchmark cheats over the years...
http://yro.slashdot.org/commen... [slashdot.org]
http://tech.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
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Re:My ancient i7-2700 (Score:5, Funny)
You've never used the "new and improved" Google Maps interface have you?
It's just like the old one, but 10x slower.
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What's an i7? I'm still using the C2Q 6600 in my main desktop. It does just fine even in modern games, although I am planning to finally upgrade once Skylake CPUs our available.
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Right with you on a C2Q-6600 that's been running at 3ghz since the day it was first booted. You and I also share the same reason for upgrading - virtualization; although mine isn't as much for performance as it is for memory. I can only buy 8GB of ram for my current machine (DDR2) and would like more.
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You mean binary blob skylake? No thanks. I'm trying to stay away from the new DRM-friendly Intel processors.
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For most X58 motherboards, all that's likely to berequired is a BIOS upgrade. If you could get 3.8 to 4.0 GHz on air on an i7-920, you can easily get 4.0-4.4 GHz on the Xeons.
Best part is that the upgrade is literally a drop-in replacement. No soft
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That's not just about the pace of change, it's about how well the machines handled the typical workloads of the day. In 1995, mainstream PCs struggled with the typical workloads of the day; my first laptop was a 100MHz Pentium with 8MB of RAM bought around then, and it was slow just booting up, getting online, word processing etc, even after I upgraded it to a massive 24MB of RAM. So any real-terms performance increase made a huge impact in terms of your day-to-day experience using the machines.
Whereas in r
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Re:My ancient i7-2700 (Score:5, Funny)
I have an 8008 in a piece of equipment I could go in the other room and turn on. And 3 or 4 full tubes of Harris (Intersil clone) 6100s if I want to run the PDP-8 instruction set. My Kaypro has an 8080 in it, and isn't just a gutted part either.
You're welcome to mow my lawn if you're just going to stand there.
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To respect my lawn full light you best start mowing now, dim sum.
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If you buy a highend Haswell CPU, they're faster than the first generation by enough to make it matter. Anything newer and you're actually slowing down. Intel's new strategy is to make slower CPUs with faster graphics and lower power consumption.
Re:My ancient i7-2700 (Score:4, Insightful)
If you buy a highend Haswell CPU, they're faster than the first generation by enough to make it matter. Anything newer and you're actually slowing down. Intel's new strategy is to make slower CPUs with faster graphics and lower power consumption.
One thing I found when speccing a new computer was single thread performance. Properly designed intense workloads will multithread (even video encoding), but for day to day use, it's usually one thread that's bogging down the system. AMD in particular pushes for multithread performance at the expense of single thread performance. For Intel, i7 Haswell chips do great at multithreading, but only slightly better at single threaded performance than i5 Haswells, for substantially more cost. Since I don't game, I went with a higher end i5.
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I'm still running the bottom-of-the-barrel CPU used in their list. Mid-2010 Mac mini, Core 2 Duo 2.4GHz E6600.
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Ancient?! I just went from a ca. 2006 2Ghz Core2Duo to a 1.7Ghz i3 a few months back. I don't game or do anything particularly CPU-intensive, so I wasn't expecting big changes, but DAMN! I had no idea. I think the drastically improved memory bandwidth really shows, particularly in Chrome. These are both 4GB machines with an SSD too. Anyway, the i3 was really excellent bang/buck. No regrets.
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Well, you can't get worse than me.... finally got around to upgrading the CPU in the ...15 year old box. Doubled its performance! :)
Poor organization (Score:1)
They change the order of the processors in the graphs so it's hard to tell one from another, and they divided the page up into a bunch of tiny little pieces. Why?
That's
like
putting
each
word
on
separate
lines.
Are they mentally challenged?
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While we are trying to improve the article...
Where is the 3770? I couldn't be bothered to type all the names-but-not-numbers into Google to see if one of them was the 3770.
Just because Intel screwed up their naming conventions doesn't mean everyone else has to further such marketing-driven value-removal.
singularity inverted (Score:1)
increase in single thread performance:
1994 to 2004: x100
2005 to 2015: x3
bla.. bla... GPUs...
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You can also add controller cards. PCIe 4x 2.0 card - goes in either 4x slot or 16x slot - has 2GB/s to play with, which is enough for the newer stuff.
Cheap PCIe 1x 2.0 card with an ASMedia SATA 6 Gbps controller (two ports) is good enough, even if the bus limits it to a theoretical 500MB/s.
The Intel memory management unit (MMU) .. (Score:2, Redundant)
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Remember this is Slashdot, so if someone cites "design flaws" without any more detail I'm going to assume they don't understand the design space and are unreasonably expecting perfection along an arbitrary line that represents some specific use case of theirs that most people don't even care about.
Remember this is the internets, and if you can't use google, you're gonna have a bad time.
https://www.blackhat.com/us-15... [blackhat.com]
https://github.com/jbangert/tr... [github.com]
I searched "flaws in intel mmu" and got these results back in the top ten. Perhaps you should learn to internet, coward.
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"10 Years of Intel Processors Compared" (Score:5, Informative)
sigh
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More than that, the graphs aren't clearly labeled, or in some cases they aren't even unit-labeled!
That kind of amateur bullshit is like nails down the chalk board.
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More than that, the graphs aren't clearly labeled, or in some cases they aren't even unit-labeled!
That kind of amateur bullshit is like nails down the chalk board.
Be grateful for what you get around here. At least it's better than that lame-ass HP smartwatch article [slashdot.org] that we got a week ago. This one at least tells you what products were tested!
Anyway, most of the graphs seem to have some kind of legend. They're just not very clear or consistent. Sometimes the unit is in the proper legend in the top right and sometimes it's in the subtitle of the graph. If it's a synthetic benchmark it won't have a unit. It's just a "score." Usually higher is better.
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Re: 4K h.265 and 1080 h.264 (Score:1)
It's either done using GPUs, or dedicated cards from BlackMagic or Matrox, or explicit encoding hardware boxes. Also, the nightly news doesn't usually air in 4K.
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4K h.265 encoding at 2 frames per second on the fastest CPU. And I thought I had a memory channel bottleneck.
Video encoding is insanely slow! How do TV stations handle moving editing and encoding their video. It seems that the evening news wouldn't be feasible at these encoding rates.
High end hardware, professional software that takes advantage of the GPU and custom hardware encoders. Plus, the editing is normally done on uncompressed video.
Not to mention things like animation/effects and encoding are often done on a render farm of dedicated servers.
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I believe editing is done with compressed video, but it's compressed frame by frame. The old MJPEG was used for this in the 90s, then it's a mode in MPEG-4 video, H264 and H265.
For fun I've considered 4096x2160 video at 60 fps, encoded in RGB with 12 bits per pixel. (however unlikely using RGB might be)
That's 2278 MiB per second of video, camera wouldn't even be able to write that to its storage.
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6 cores (Score:1)
Plenty of 6 core Xeon X5650 boxes one eBay for a fraction of their retail.
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Processors ought to have a minimum of twice the number of cores by now. Intel could at least have the decency to offer the option of trading a GPU for more cores.
(Yes, there are outrageously expensive server parts with more cores...)
They do. The only Intel "consumer" chips without a GPU are the 6-core EXTREME(!!!) edition.
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The eXXXtreme is at eight cores now.
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You missed the part about minimum; it is meaningless if Intel offers some hideously expensive outlier part. Granted, there are some six core variants which cost less, but they are still expensive 130-140W LGA2011 parts. The mainstream is still stuck squarely with 2-4 cores. Two cores in 2015 is pitiful.
4 years, almost no change. (Score:4, Interesting)
What strikes me the most is that today's processors are barely any faster than the 2011 processors.
4 years and only a small speed increase in real performance - 4% for games!!!!! FOUR PERCENT over 4 years. Time to ditch silicon and to start using materials that support higher clock speeds.
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How much of that is the fault of the processor vs the fault of the games which really haven't gotten any more visually stunning thanks to coding primarily for the lowest common denominator, consoles.
Now I really feel old (Score:2)
No Xeon? (Score:1)
I wish they had included Xeons, even though they're considered "server" processors rather than desktop.
I was running an i5-2500k overclocked on my mobo, and was looking at upgrading to an i7-3770k to get virtualization and hyperthreading, but it would have cost me well over $300.
Instead, I found a deal on a Xeon E3-1245v2 for $219 and I'm very happy with it. Runs at 77W instead of 95W too.
I've seen better comparisons (Score:2)
What kind of crappy Benchmark is this? (Score:1)
Deliberately bottlenecking the hell out of the older Dual cores with a GTX 980 and 4GB RAM?