Ask Slashdot: Should CPU, GPU Name-Numbering Indicate Real World Performance? 184
dryriver writes: Anyone who has built a PC in recent years knows how confusing the letters and numbers that trail modern CPU and GPU names can be because they do not necessarily tell you how fast one electronic part is compared to another electronic part. A Zoomdaahl Core C-5 7780 is not necessarily faster than a Boomberg ElectronRipper V-6 6220 -- the number at the end, unlike a GFLOPS or TFLOPS number for example, tells you very little about the real-world performance of the part. It is not easy to create one unified, standardized performance benchmark that could change this. One part may be great for 3D gaming, a competing part may smoke the first part in a database server application, and a third part may compress 4K HEVC video 11% faster. So creating something like, say, a Standardized Real-World Application Performance Score (SRWAPS) and putting that score next to the part name, letters, or series number will probably never happen. A lot of competing companies would have to agree to a particular type of benchmark, make sure all benchmarking is done fairly and accurately, and so on and so forth.
But how are the average consumers just trying to buy the right home laptop or gaming PC for their kids supposed to cope with the "letters and numbers salad" that follows CPU, GPU and other computer part names? If you are computer literate, you can dive right into the different performance benchmarks for a certain part on a typical tech site that benchmarks parts. But what if you are "Computer Buyer Joe" or "Jane Average" and you just want to glean quickly which two products -- two budget priced laptops listed on Amazon.com for example -- have the better performance overall? Is there no way to create some kind of rough numeric indicator of real-world performance and put it into a product's specs for quick comparison?
But how are the average consumers just trying to buy the right home laptop or gaming PC for their kids supposed to cope with the "letters and numbers salad" that follows CPU, GPU and other computer part names? If you are computer literate, you can dive right into the different performance benchmarks for a certain part on a typical tech site that benchmarks parts. But what if you are "Computer Buyer Joe" or "Jane Average" and you just want to glean quickly which two products -- two budget priced laptops listed on Amazon.com for example -- have the better performance overall? Is there no way to create some kind of rough numeric indicator of real-world performance and put it into a product's specs for quick comparison?
What's "real world performance"? (Score:5, Insightful)
As soon as someone gives me a definitive definition of what "real world performance" for a CPU/GPU is that doesn't change over time/software-version/user-care-ometer is, I might agree that it's feasible to use it to name models.
Exactly. Stupid idea for many reasons. (Score:3)
What exact 'performance' figure does dryriver suggest?
Raw GIPS/TFLOPS? pretty much meaningless and very easy to get an achievable peak number.
SPECINT/SPECFP? with what OS, compiler, flags, version, etc?
Anyone who knows much about cpu/gpu performance knows why this is a very very very silly 'suggestion'. It would be not more meaningful than the numbers they assign now.
The complain should be with the manufacturers - please come up with more sensible naming practices, but in the end, thats their decision.
Marke
Re:Exactly. Stupid idea for many reasons. (Score:5, Insightful)
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Now define "boot" for the boot time... what graphics settings for that game, what third-party extensions are used in Word, and where/how we're copying the file and whether cache is involved.
Of course, the first thing I would do with a shiny new machine is transfer over my video card, so all GPU measurements are useless right out of the gate. The second thing I would do is to replace any spinning disks with a mid-range SSD, making the other benchmarks useless, as well. My mother wouldn't change any hardware,
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On the other hand, you can have a basic computer and swap in different CPU's or graphic cards or power supplies and compare the speed.
I had a Netburst Pentium D at 2.8 GHz which I swapped for a 1.86 GHz C2d and almost halved compilation time, later swapped in a 2.8GHz Core extreme and knocked another 1/3rd off compile time. Everything else seemed to get about the same speedup as well.
If I was a gamer, I could have done similar with graphic cards.
The problem is how things are inter-related. A slow CPU can't
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Even then what's being asked here is like asking which power supply will make your computer faster; it makes no sense. You could have the hottest-shit-fast CPU available, and since you're booting it off a cheap USB 2 flash drive and a USB 2 video adapter, the performance will suck. Then you put it side-by-side with the cheapest shittiest CPU you can find, but with the best x16 PCIe graphics card and a top of the line SATA SSD, and it kicks the other systems' ass.
Or possibly the opposite based on the workloa
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The power supply can limit on what hardware you can add to your system though. It self doesn't make the computer faster, but it allows to build a faster computer.
It is like high octane gasoline. It doesn't make your car faster or run better, if you car isn't designed for it, it is just wasting your money. But the car that is designed to use high octane gasoline, can normally run faster then you car can.
Re:Exactly. Stupid idea for many reasons. (Score:5, Insightful)
No, you dont need 850w for your single GPU PC
True except for some edge cases.
Its job is to turn on, not die, and when it does die, not take out everything else with it
You missed "deliver power at the specified voltage and amperage, within tolerances, including not sagging, spiking or being 'noisy'". Bonus if it can do this for more than five years.
It sounds like you've never had intermittent faults that turned out to be the fault of a cheap PSU aging _way_ too soon and far from gracefully.
There are reasons some people insist that your PSU is (at least) as important as any other component, and it has nothing to do with 'bigger is better'.
But hey, don't let your ignorance stop you 'shit[ting] on' someone else's.
Re: Exactly. Stupid idea for many reasons. (Score:4, Insightful)
The PSU is very important, for all the reasons you say.
But there is a culture that advocates much bigger and more expensive PSUs than required, and that is bleeding into the realm of casual PC builders.
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Eh..... Run sustained operations too close to the maximums, and components get a bit too warm and start failing earlier, especially in a dusty or otherwise poor environment. That's a pretty common issue on fielded systems where "preventative maintenance" is (sometimes literally) a foreign concept.
A PSU that's moderately overspec'd (I wouldn't go more than 50% over TDP as a rule) or higher-end brand can quite happily get clogged full of dust, have a fan die, or absorb a few spikes without any failure, becaus
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Does it supply clean power (i.e. low noise)
Does it supply enough current, have tight enough voltage regulation, and have a fast enough transient response time so that no supply rail droops occur, possibly causing errors/lockups
Is it built to high enough quality standards that it isn't going to blow up in a year
That's all you really need to worry about with a computer power supply.
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Exactly. As soon as someone comes up with a standard and an agreement by manufacturers to adhere to it, such as all iterations of a graphics card being something like GTX+1000, then GTX+1010, a company whose card *should* be GTX+1020 would name it GTX+1100 just to get better sales, and then you just have lawsuits that follow and a richer card manufacturer.
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To prevent that you could obligate that the numbers have to be proportional to some arbitrary metric. First problem, what metric? Second, in four years time the latest version would have to be called GTX+47000000 or something.
Frankly, the question's retarded in the first place.
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You are trying to distill a complex equation down to one number. /sarcasm If only we had a way to do that -- oh wait, we do! It's called a benchmark:
* 3DMark [futuremark.com]
* Unigine Valley Benchmark (2013) [unigine.com]
Maybe you should stop reading shitty websites that don't show a normalized score.
Desktop GPU Performance Hierarchy Table [tomshardware.com] and Best GPU's of 2018 [tomshardware.com] make it trivial to compare _how_ a GPU performs.
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Except there isn't even one benchmark that rules them all. There's not even an agreement as to which matters more for what, not to mention how accurate it relates to any one user's actual use case.
If you play Civ 6 all day long, you give 2 shits about whether something scores higher in 3DMark (because Civ 6 happens to be AI limited).
If you do software development, you (again) give 2 shits about 3DMark or PCMark or Geekbench. Because being fast in GCC is a different workload (that perform differently on diff
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other fields?
the name "pentium" was invented mostly because Intel couldn't trademark "586" since it was merely a series number.
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and a lexical sort of your type would just lead to your competitor releasing the "zzzzzzzzzoom processor".
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Use Dhrystones and Whetstones
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Both of which fit perfectly in at least the last level cache of modern CPU's. So you have no idea what performance for workloads that don't fit in cache (all of them that matter) performs.
And both have fairly rudimentary hot loops that basically no modern software that users care about (mostly javascript and media creation software) cares about.
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*whoosh*
Re:What's "real world performance"? (Score:4, Informative)
Someone created such a system once. It was called the "PR" or Performance Rating [wikipedia.org]. It was used by AMD and Cyrix at a time when they had processors with different MIPS/Hz than Intel. The thing is, the benchmark was mostly integer based, so when games like Quake came out, which used the Intel Pentium's pipelined FPU, which the other manufacturer's processors didn't have, the PR kind fell by the wayside.
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And this is kind of the problem. The goalposts for performance move constantly so it's best to force users to research.
However they want because the question is missing an obvious gotchya: Unless you're building a high performance special purpose system most people couldn't give a crap and in general purposes their choice of CPU or GPU has very little effect on the system performance, so they'll go cheap.
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Exactly. Normally hardware makers don't make their top of the line products suck. But they may make different design decisions.
GPU A may be able to dump out billions more polygons per second then GPU B. But GPU B does more advanced coloring and edge rounding and environmental effects. So GPU A may work better on a higher resolution screen, but on normal resolution screens GPU B gives better results.
Back in the 1990's The key indicator was the Megahertz, So people normally would opt for the 386 25mhz comput
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Passmark (Score:5, Informative)
Passmark. You're welcome. https://www.passmark.com/ [passmark.com]
Re:Passmark (Score:5, Informative)
That's useful AFTER you bought the machine.
What's useful BEFORE you buy the machine? Simple: CPUBoss and GPUBoss.
http://cpuboss.com/compare-cpu... [cpuboss.com]
http://gpuboss.com/compare-gpu... [gpuboss.com]
Huh? (Score:2)
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If you click the links you'd find out :)
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Cool story. Tells me nothing. How fast will it encode video? How fast will it run a game? How fast will it crunch an excel table? How fast will it calculated digits of Pi?
There is no single benchmark that can answer what CPU or GPU you should buy without knowing WHY a person is buying it.
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How fast will it run a game”???
What the actual fuck.
WHICH GAME?
There are plenty benchmarks and reviews for each CPU and GPU, and that's exactly the problem, you can't encode that into a product name. Out of the 100+ Pi-related benchmarks, which one is the reference one? Out of the million or so games out there, which is the reference one? And which patch version, running on which platform, which operating system and which drivers?
See, that's why I prefer comparing components' performance rather than l
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What the actual fuck.
WHICH GAME?
No actual fucking involved. You simply extended my reply on an already originally absurd premise to the next level. This entire thread is stupid right back to the original Ask Slashdot submission.
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I apologize. I thought your comment was linked to mine, instead if was on the story itself.
My comprehension fail reared its ugly head once more.
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I could have written it better. But yes my point is benchmarking a thing tells you nothing. Benchmarking multiple things and rolling them into one result tells even less.
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For those that want a more detailed answer. Literally type in any CPU/GPU model name/number into Google followed by the word "Passmark" - the top result will almost certainly be the product page on the Passmark web site. Each product has a simplistic single numerical overall score. Just compare those. Passmark isn't perfect, but is accurate enough to count as a general overview for basic purchasing requirements.
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Passmark isn't perfect, but is accurate enough to count as a general overview for basic purchasing requirements.
It is also hard to game because the results in the db are crowd-sourced with only the cpu model or gpu model being a fixed element. So some of the people running the bench have slow ddr, others fast, some have virus scanners running, others dont, and so on.
The results end up being close to the mean or median of what to expect if you buy or build a system featuring the part.
The benchmarks you find with "reviewers" can be gamed by the reviewer OR in some cases the manufacturer (who "generously" donated t
Re:Passmark (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, or more specifically:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/c... [cpubenchmark.net]
https://www.videocardbenchmark... [videocardbenchmark.net]
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There can never be a wholesome benchmark, because the variety of workload possibilities is very large. Phoronix does good work in this area, but most often, it's done with Linux, where a Windows user wanted to know-- or someone plugged in an external GPU unit and wanted to see what it could do, given differing possibilities.
There won't be a simple one-score benchmark, so long as people do differing things with GPUs, which started out as graphics processors but now serve many masters as a math co-processor.
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Correction. Intel is for fanboys and single core perf. For now.. And amd is for multi core, budget centric and cpu market correction(Intel prices anybody?) they both have advantages like all am3 and above CPU's can use ECC ram. And Intel for data center power to perf concerns. But once again for now.. Thanks to people like me and the mining community AMD no has he money for proper development. And the dirty games Intel played multiple times in the past hasn't helped amd either.. How can you expect a company
Define 'real world performance' (Score:5, Insightful)
Clock speed doesn't tell you the whole story and to the vast majority of people (read as: non-technical people) it wouldn't mean anything to them anyway, other than maybe one number is bigger than another number.
Same goes for so-called 'benchmark' test suites, which I think can be argued as being biased in one way or another (or a processor gaming the system to make it appear it's faster on such-and-such benchmark test).
I think that for the people such information matters to, they're going to already know what's what without anyone spelling it out for them.
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You'd be surprised at how much modern code doesn't do "calculations" at all. A browser session is literally just function redirect after function redirect.
It isn't possible (Score:2)
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Windows Experience Index was effing stupid. If you had a harddrive your score was 6.
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Hard drives are quite slow for normal computer usage, and should be discouraged. I watched a computer boot Windows 10 to the desktop in 2 seconds while using an SSD. The spinning rust does have valid use cases, and places it excels. However, running Windows with a nice experience on standard applications isn't one of them.
Marketing (Score:2)
I suspect Intel went to the i3/5/7 numbering because they could not continue to raise clock speeds. The new numbering obfuscates performance. For example, I'm running an i3 desktop that while 2 core, each core is faster than many i5 single cores. That means I get great performance out of a single thread at a much lower price. It's just not as good at handling numerous simultaneous processes.
The obfuscation goes back at least to the Core 2 (Score:3)
I got bitten by Intel Obfuscation Syndrome when I bought a Core 2 Quad Q8200, not realizing that it was the only one of the Core 2 Quads to not have virtualization. Yeah, I should have looked before I leaped. In the end, it was a bad buy all around, as the DG43NB motherboard I bought to go with it also ended up crapping out in a surprisingly short time, but lasting long enough to be out of warranty. Needless to say, all of my later builds have been AMD (with various makes of motherboards).
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I think generally speaking marketing tends to decrease transparency and increase obfuscation as new product performance shows fewer gains.
If new products had better general performance than old products, product naming would tend to track the performance improvements as was seen in the Mhz era.
But as producers run out of simple performance improvements, they have to start trying to create a new demand profile, often one that's kind of made up and not representative of actual performance.
IMHO, most capitalis
Well, the year of manufacture is on the box (Score:2)
Is there no way to create some kind of rough numeric indicator of real-world performance and put it into a product's specs for quick comparison?
If it was manufactured this or last year, it's probably better than Joe or Jane's 5-year-old laptop which was more than likely working just fine for them (modulo bloatware and registry cruft) until it broke. That's good enough, right?
Same as cars (Score:5, Insightful)
Cars are also complex, they don't have simple-to-understand names and variants and require you to document yourself and investigate for large amounts of time before committing to a purchase.
Don't try to dumb down complex machinery. It will never work.
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No, they are not. It might be easy to you, since you already know cars, but take me for example. I don't have a driver's license (health reasons) and I am not interested in cars. I can tell them apart by their logo and sometimes shape, and of course I recognize a few expensive brands (Ferrari, Lamborghini). Other than that, I have no idea how the Golf VI is different than the Golf V, or why this 1300 ccm engine is better than that 1500 ccm engine.
What's the difference between Mercedes C-, E- and S- Klasse?
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So what? Is it a facelift adding 3 HP and wider body with some bullshit brighter LED headlights, or is it a total remake adding 101 new things and improving 1000 more?
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It can, however, be reduced to a VERY LONG alphanumeric string.
The one number that truly matters (Score:1)
Since we're living in an ideal capitalist society, the number that indicates relative performance should be preceded by a dollar sign.
Bogomips is the answer! (Score:2)
Oh yeah, I'm currently at 5808 bogomips on my I7-7820HQ.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Intel processor numbers (Score:2)
Seeing as it took Intel so long to go from i3 to i5 to i7 processors to only now releasing i9s they have a long way to go to get back to the glory version number days of i386 [wikipedia.org].
In all seriousness though, I've kind of given up on making sense of the processor/GPU models and just paste it in Google to see the specs and compare that with another one I am already familiar with.
Well, sure, but... (Score:5, Insightful)
2. Unlike the EPA/feds, there's nobody to punish corporations when they cheat.
It's really not hard to do a little research to see how CPUs compare. Yes, it's a PIA if you're buying spur-of-the-moment and comparing laptops at the Big Box Store. But you need to do research. Hyperthreading and multiprocs will speed up some apps and do very little for others, some standardized benchmark number printed in the specs won't really tell consumers anything very useful. Too many variables and dependencies.
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CPU isn't the bottleneck for Jane/Joe (Score:2)
Just convince them that the HDD option isn't worth the $100 in savings.
The shoe doesn't always fit (Score:4, Insightful)
I'll try a novel analogy instead of the typical car thing. Imagine these chips (CPUs, GPUs, etc.) as shoes. Yes, shoes. Now there are obviously shoes of all kinds of sizes and types, and no one shoe of a certain size/type can be said to fit a particular person's requirements. Too big, too small. Great (9) for the red carpet runway, not so much (2) the tarmac kind. Perfect (10) for the alpine, chafing and sweaty (1) on the beach.
User A does spreadsheets all day, B does FPS games, C does CAD, D AI research, etc.. Some require multi-threaded performance; some, single-threaded, etc. etc.. What might seem like a good performance for one use is weak for another. It's just not possible to come up with a workable single axis performance metric when performance is determined by multiple variables, each having their own weight depending upon the user.
If you want to shop for kit that best fits your needs, you first need to come up with an understanding of the importance of each of the variables then go comparison shop the various benchmarks out there. As with most nearly everything it's best to just ignore the marketing speech and go do your own research.
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Well, game specs seem pretty clear (Score:2)
Somehow, game companies manage to figure out which CPUs/GPU are required and preferred for each of their games. Of course it's almost impossible to tell if my current hardware meets those specs because the numbering is completely out of order. i3, i5, i7, sure the i7 is somehow better, but how much better? Will my top end i5 beat the medium tear i7 that they ask for? It's maddening. At this point I only buy Nvidia GPU systems because I've sweated blood learning their numbering system and I don't want to
market solution (Score:5, Funny)
As "Computer Buyer Joe", I have found that the best approach is to get my computer nerd nephew to hook me up with the good shit. I tell him how much I can spend and which games I want to play and he does the rest. Then, I throw him $50, which he immediately spends on oxycontin or rap records or whatever it is that kids spend money on these days.
Already Done (Score:5, Insightful)
They already do this. Always look for the standardised number following the dollar sign.
Educate yourself (Score:2)
Not real performance, but product differences (Score:2, Interesting)
I don't think the name needs to denote real performance numbers. However, it ABSOLUTELY SHOULD denote different products which HAVE PERFORMANCE DIFFERENCES! Case and point, AMD first released a RX560 which was benchmarked and reviewed by all the media/press which used 1024 Stream Processors and 16 compute units. A few weeks/months later, AMD quietly released a new version, still calling it the RX560 (with no other indication of a change and no announcement of a change), and instead having 896 Stream Process
Price == performance (Score:5, Insightful)
But how are the average consumers just trying to buy the right home laptop or gaming PC for their kids supposed to cope
They don't need to. The average user will have their needs met by any computer built in the past 10 years.
if you want high-end or specialised stuff, just let the price guide you. The more expensive (so long as you don't get suckered into paying a brand premium) a generic computer is, the better it will perform.
Most people buy to a budget, anyway - not to a specification. That is why the first question a sales-droid will ask you is "how much do you have to spend?".
Maybe for a desktop (Score:2)
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Indeed. Price drives decisions for the average consumer in this space. Performance is secondary, especially so since any of them will work just fine for the average consumer. Asking "how will they know which CPU they need?" makes about as much sense as asking "How will they know whether they need a Ferrari or a Corolla?"
It already exists, ... to a point (Score:3)
The model names are mostly standardized now, even across different manufacturers.
Intel has, for example Core i7-4790K, and Core i7-8700K. AMD would have Ryzen 2950x, and nVidia would have GTX 1070 Ti. There is a similar pattern in all of them.
Intel (desktop) chips read like 4-7-90-K, 4th generation, i7, last iteration (highest performance variant), unlocked (non-K versions are not enabled for overclocking). Then 8-7-00-K would be 8th generation, i7, first iteration.
AMD copied this to an extend. 2-9-50X would ve second generation Ryzen, i9 counterpart, mid-level, but -X suffix seem to mean slightly improved performance (all AMD chips were unlocked for overclocking).
nVidia is similar 970 would be 9th generation GTX, second highest level (geared towards gamers with mid-to-large budgets), while 10-80 Ti would be 10th generation GTX, highest level (geared towards people with serious money), and updated (Ti) edition.
In general, generation increases add significant power reduction, allowing less running cost, and higher performance for the same price. In fact a future i3 might be better than a previous i5.
(I'm skipping Pentium/Celeron which are lower binned silicones of the same design, and Atoms, and of course Xeon server and workstation chips).
Looking at Wikipedia for the CPU/GPU generation gives sufficient detail for differences between offerings. If I'm planning to purchase a CPU to use for many years, I would benefit spending some time understanding those differences.
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You can't even use the first number as the generation, as the really high end chips in some generations increment the first number for some reason. For example 38XX and 39XX i7 chips are Sandy Bridge (2nd generation), the 48XX and 49XX i7 chips are Ivy Bridge (3rd generation). Why? Ask Intel, I have no idea.
Here's A Tip (Score:2)
Bonus Tip: The two budget priced laptops listed on Amazon.com? Performance sucks on both.
Good luck! (Score:2)
Aside from the fact that you can't clearly define any simple set of tasks as being indicative of "real world performance", you also can't dictate to manufacturers what they call their products. As soon as you come up with a suite of tests that is your "real world" benchmark, then you can guarantee that manufacturers will optimise their designs specifically for the suite of tests you're running and game the benchmarks.
Re: the numbers, this would be like telling Audi that they can't sell a car called an RS3 t
Stupid idea (Score:2)
Do you really think you can boil a performance metric down into a single number? It's a multidimensional problem.
some approximation should be used... (Score:2)
just some approximation.
The average consumer will never understand (Score:2)
The average consumer will look at three things; The CPU speed, RAM size and hard drive size. You can't assign a single spec to computer components because how they interact with each other matters. For example the motherboard's bus speed can have a huge effect on performance, but only if you have ram that is fast enough to use it and a CPU that can keep up.
Rule of thumb: Build the PC yourself. I start with price and review score. If it's cheap, there's a reason. Get a good motherboard then research out what
Uhh... calling Goodhart? (Score:2)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
"When a measure becomes a target, it ceases to be a good measure."
"All metrics of scientific evaluation are bound to be abused. Goodhart's law (named after the British economist who may have been the first to announce it) states that when a feature of the economy is picked as an indicator of the economy, then it inexorably ceases to function as that indicator because people start to game it.[6]"
Why ? (Score:2)
Why should GPU's be treated any different than any other product. Car names have no bearing on performance, drug names CERTAINLY have no relation to what they are or do to you or for you. It is strictly a marketing scam to try and grab the attention of potential buyers. Consider Ultra Mega Platinum Extreme vitamins. I could see a case where they should be required to provide some actual real world indication of mflops or tflops or general productivity but that would require some standardized measure perform
Device manufacturer's problem (Score:2)
This is a problem device manufacturers should be willing to fix. If consumers cannot decide which product to by on performance, the only way to decide is price. Such a market is doomed to crush manufacturer's margins.
But fortunately, most consumers are OEM, which may still have the ability to understand parts performances
Indirectly - like it already does (Score:2)
I don't think trying to make CPU/GPU numbers comparable between vendors is a good idea - whatever standard is used WILL be abused and exploited, to the detriment of actual performance if need be.
But within each vendor, there should be general ways to tell performance based on a model number and a simple, consistent numbering scheme.
* Some number needs to indicate relative performance. A higher number here should indicate higher performance in every reasonable usage. These do not need to be on an absolute sc
A problem already solved (Score:2)
This was tried before in the past (Score:2)
By AMD and Cyrix. Was called P-Rating (P for performance, not Pentium).
It did not work then, it will not work now.
Pretty sure the model numbers are not arbitrary (Score:3)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
A table like the above, will explain the breakdown of the numbering. It hasn't changed much with each generation since the core series lineup came in 10 years ago.
Here is a better breakdown with more words than numbers. https://www.intel.com/content/... [intel.com]
But perhaps youre a casual and that's all a bit too esoteric for you?
If you want to easy it up, just go to www.cpubenchmark.net and you can easily compare all cpus and pricepoints. Look at single thread performance if that's all your application can handle (or you are a gamer..), and total performance if its multithreaded. There is a wealth of user submitted data there that i would never view processor advertisements without.
Its really not something you need to spend more than an afternoon getting acquainted with. An exercise that anyone who wants to spend $500+ on a new PC should be more than willing to do. As others have said, basic research is important when buying most things.
I have had my sig for well over 15 years now. (Score:2)
And it is still accurate.
Just make the model numbers unique (Score:3)
This is not specific to CPUs and GPUs, but I am sick of model names/numbers being reused for different products. I was browsing Dell's website recently and found it frustrating to find that the Inspiron 3000 series comes in 15" and New 15" varieties. The 15" variety could use either a Celeron or Pentium processor, while the New 15" ones could be either 7th or 8th generation i3, i5 or i7. Why have three 0s in the number if you are never going to change any of those digits?
And don't get me started on the Inspiron 5000 15" and New 15" range or the Inspiron 7000 15" (but no New 15") range. There is also the Nvidia GTX1060, which comes in two varieties that performs differently.
No. Just no. (Score:3)
It's already bad enough that hardware manufacturers tweak and skew their drivers to eke out another dot at some artificial benchmark program, I don't want them to actually produce their hardware to fit an arbitrary metric that has nothing to do with real world problems because they have to since some illiterates want to compare numbers instead of finding out what they mean.
no problem (Score:2)
for average joe, any computer is basically fast and good enough.
Well, which of these is faster: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Re: (Score:2)
Yes (Score:2)
Yours sincerely,
John can-perform-basic-car-repairs sometimes-forgets-anniversaries can't-play-an-instrument digital-logic-design-expert not-very-sporty Smith MEng
lol yeah (Score:2)
Some standards would be nice (Score:2)
Because processors in general are general purpose in nature, it would be impossible to assign a model number based on some made up score. How many processor cores, how much L1, L2, L3 cache is there, clock speeds, how well optimized the operating system is for the chip in question, chipsets, RAM speeds, storage speeds.
Special purpose chips, not having flexibility in terms of what gets run, does not have that sort of confusion. How quickly can you handle various video codecs for example, will not have as
Cost (Score:2)
If this is a consumer thing, why not index on the biggest raw costs to what make the chip suitable to it's purpose.
Transistor density, clock speed, and maybe R&D costs.