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Comment by swarnie_ | Hacker News Reader

Can anyone vouch for how well consumer CPUs have come along in the last 5-10 years?

I'm still running a i7 2700k and haven't even felt the need to upgrade. I guess i didn't want to when Intel only released $600-$800 scam CPUs, now were seeing reasonable competition is it worth another look?

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I run a meta benchmark[0] that is set up to answer exactly questions this this. The answer: Processors made a big jump since then! There was not that much movement after the 2600K, but only until Ryzen got released. The 2600K is now on rank 86 of my benchmark, way below $120 cpus like the Ryzen 5 2600 [1]. That comparison just shows games, but in in other application workloads the difference is even bigger, because of the better multithreaded performance of Ryzen and Threadripper processors. The 3970X just completely dominates outside of games, but with the Ryzen 9s there are two cheaper and still extremely strong processor for consumer AM4 systems available. And Intel has way stronger processors than the 2600K now as well, the complete 9000 series staring with the i5-9400F ($140). Stronger cores and more of them, i5s have six now, the i7-9700K 8 and the i9-9900K adds hyperthreading.

[0]: https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark

[1]: https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%...

The comparison (https://www.pc-kombo.com/us/benchmark/games/cpu/compare?ids%...) shows that the Ryzen 5 2600 (late 2018) barely manages to outdo the i7-2600K (early 2013) since the compound score difference is 7.54 - 6.16 = 1.38. Plus the gaming benchmarks that the Ryzen dominate are mildly misleading since all the games run above 60fps so average gamer will be fine, i.e. Witcher 3 comes in at 133fps on the i7-2600K and clocks 200fps on the Ryzen. Of course processors HAVE become massively faster but the question remains whether one has a workload that's sufficiently parallelizable to warrant the upgrade. Individual core speed improvements are still lacking.

The compound score is really just a rating. It does not reflect performance that way. You really want to look at the individual gaming benchmarks for this.

There are many gamers using 144Hz displays now, so 60 FPS is just one of multiple possible targets :) Witcher 3 is also really not the heaviest of games.

> Of course processors HAVE become massively faster but the question remains whether one has a workload that's sufficiently parallelizable to warrant the upgrade.

Well, sure. But all common workloads are parallelizable now. Whether it's games or running your browser, the time of strictly single threaded workloads is over.

> Individual core speed improvements are still lacking.

Interestingly, that really depends on your definition, of what one expects. The difference in single threaded workloads is smaller than in multithreaded workloads - obviously, there are more cores - but the cores are also ~30% faster in this case, and Ryzen 3000 got another round of singlethread performance improvements. For example https://www.computerbase.de/2019-07/amd-ryzen-3200g-3400g-te... shows that, a benchmark of single core application workloads.

Yeah, you are right, especially in relation to the single core speed which I must admit I just had not looked into enough when writing my response. Had a look at https://www.cpubenchmark.net/singleThread.html which confirms computerbase.de article exceedingly well in terms of the much improved single core perf across the Intel/AMD divide over last 5 yrs.

This is great, thanks. One of my biggest issues in PC hardware has been comparing older parts with modern ones. Most sites don't retest old hardware with new tests that they use on new hardware, so you end up with wildly different numbers that don't tell you anything.

Thanks, and exactly! It's an interesting algorithmic problem to get many of those separate benchmarks and put them into a global order. That's what the site does.

As entirely anecdotal evidence, I upgraded from a 2500k (that I'd been running at 4.5GHz) to a 3600 and the perceived difference in speed is phenomenal. At ~€400 for CPU+Motherboard+RAM it's also great value.

Every day work just feels more snappy and compile times are down by a lot. Single thread is a lot faster and of course having 12 threads instead of 4 makes a huge difference (of course that effect might be less for you since you already have SMT).

Paired with a 1060 I even notice quite a difference in gaming. Even though I didn't necessarily have 100% usage on the CPU, I was 10-20FPS below benchmarks for my GPU. This didn't really make sense to me, but after I upgraded I indeed got those extra frames.

I haven't done any scientific on the performance improvement, but according to PassMark, I am getting roughly a 120% performance increase on parallelizable workloads, even when taking my OC into account.

> Even though I didn't necessarily have 100% usage on the CPU, I was 10-20FPS below benchmarks for my GPU. This didn't really make sense to me, but after I upgraded I indeed got those extra frames.

That can happen when the game performance relies on the workload of one thread (or at least less then cores/thread count) that couldn't be properly offloaded to the idle cores. The 3600 has not only more but also stronger cores than the 2500K, and thus even without reaching 100% processor usage before the game can run faster now, because the critical thread runs faster.

You're right, of course. What I meant to say is I was significantly below 100% (around 80) on every single core.

Therefore I really thought it couldn't have been a CPU bottleneck (since one would assume it could have scaled at least another 10% on every core, but in the end it was.

Funnily enough i have a 1060 right now, this entire comment is scarily on point for my exact situation!

Out of curiosity, what was your last GPU?

I didn't change the GPU in this upgrade. I was using a 1060 with the 2500k and am using the 1060 now.

Before that I had a Radeon 6970, that I bought with the 2500k, but I upgraded that in 2016.

I know, I figured you'd upgraded it before at some point. I was just curious. 6970 to 1060 is quite the jump. That must've been great.

Yes, yes, it was! To be honest the fact that the fan turns off during normal desktop operation is almost a bigger deal to me these days, though. I recently looked at my upgrade options and nothing in a price range that I can justify is really attractive. I suppose I need to wait for more than one generation, after all my last upgrade was roughly a four generation jump.

In hindsight upgrading a week or so before an exam might not have been the smartest decision, however.

non OC 2700K difference to modern CPUs is huge, OC to >=4.5GHz and it quickly diminishes unless doing crazy threaded jobs.

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