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Comment by throwphoton | Hacker News Reader

It's becoming really difficult to figure out whether an X-core i5 is better or worse (even for a specific purpose) than a Y-core i7 or any other combination of [model, clock_speed, num_cores].

Last time I bought a machine I cut this Gordian Knot by not giving a shit, which has to count as some kind of failure of branding.

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After GHz stopped mattering (and maybe to some extent it never did)... I lost track of all things CPU and what matters.

Anytime I looked into it I felt like I got a lot of truisms and mixed advice, and the PC enthusiast crowd seems equivalent to the 'pixel peeper' crowd of photography, obsessed with misc stats that I'm not sure will matter to me, or anyone.

> I lost track of all things CPU and what matters.

The things that matter vary based on your use case. Your best bet would be to find benchmarks for an application that matters to you.

If that's too much work, AMD's Ryzen platform is the best general-purpose platform at this point.

These days, choose a processor that meets your core count needs and budget. Some applications are primarily single-threaded, so for those you might want a processor with fewer, faster cores. For parallelizable tasks like compiling code (up until the linking stage), more cores is better.

It might also be worth buying an AMD just to support them, but OEMs still mostly favor Intel. Performance per dollar is usually a lot better on the AMD side.

Depends on the form factor. On desktop yes AMD might be better for your money but as an owner of Ryzen 3500u laptop I'd recommend Intel to anyone. For some reason Chrome is more janky than my old i5 4300u and it lags when playing 1080p x265 files in every player I've tried.

Can you check chrome://gpu and make sure that Video Decode: Unavailable does not appear? Video decode should be handled by your GPU, not the CPU. If this is Linux, then you might not be using the GPU at all, which would explain both symptoms.

Hardware protected video decode and out-of-process rasterization are the only ones unavailable. Everything else is Hardware accelerated. Another thing I notice is that GPU stays a steady 20% and rarely every shoots up, which I believe is what contributes to video player lags. No matter what I try in Windows 10 - performance mode, gaming mode it still won't go beyond 20% when playing videos.

The new Ryzen 4000 laptop APUs are quite an improvement over last year. It's important to note that the APUs of each generation are always an architectural generation behind (so, the 3500U is actual a Zen+ architecture, not Zen 2).

They might be, but I am talking about the situation RIGHT NOW. LTT also talks about this here - https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nfz46HXvPLc It was very noticeably janky out of the box but with updates it became better but IMO it's still not at Intel's level yet. Also battery life is better on Intel side and will only improve with the 10nm chips they are shipping now. I have yet to try Linux distro on this machine but looking for something with decent touch support, so it's all Windows 10 right now.

And sometimes your new machine is slower than the old one. Ive seen that a couple times with laptops people purchased. They replaced a 2-3 year old laptop that cost $2500 with one that cost $1200 (but lighter thinner) and the new one had the same number of cores, and ran slower.

Some of the biggest factors for the average person that get disregarded are video cards and cooling. Modern CPUs absolutely need good cooling or they will throttle and create stutters and hiccups. A separate video card makes high res interfaces more fluid (4k hooked up to a monitor or TV) _and_ takes that heat off the CPU which is usually trying to boost and throttle inside a laptop or poorly cooled PC.

Noctua makes some really good heatsinks. It's my understanding that most users don't need liquid cooling. When would you say someone needs to switch to liquid cooling?

You also need good air flow inside the case. Something like big tower with plenty of empty space and additional case fans. If your case is tiny, liquid cooling might be better.

My guess is that a big noctua heatpipe heatsink would keep a CPU from throttling most of the time and do well cooling it, but it would probably be loud when it has to get rid of a lot of heat. The great thing about liquid coolers is they can get rid of more heat with less fan speed and end up quieter (if the pump isn't loud).

Intel's marketing isn't helping any. They have Comet Lake and Ice Lake parts all in the "10th gen" bag which is misleading at best.

when I last bought a laptop, notebookcheck's [1] cpu ranking was helpful.

[1] - https://www.notebookcheck.net/Mobile-Processors-Benchmark-Li...

I agree, but I thought it was just a factor of me getting older. 25 years ago we used to sit around at lunch and discuss the latest CPU technology and argue which one was better. Now it just doesn't matter (for the most part) apart from supporting one manufacturer over another or choosing based on price.

I don't have the time nor inclination for digging into the minutia around CPUs and their names. It's no longer fun or really even necessary, unless you're into HFT or some other activity that requires every last processor cycle. meh

I don't know why Intel has continued down this path so aggressively. The article says that they introduced 32 new processors. This is a small incremental update to keep the same architecture and process size from lagging behind the rest of the ecosystem and now there are 32 new cpus that don't perform much better than what came out half a decade ago.

What do you expect Intel to do? Keep selling the same CPUs? Declare themselves bankrupt? Switch to TSMC for chip production? They are doing what they can in this situation. And I'm sure that their sales are far from zero.

I think there is a middle ground where they don't release 32 brand new CPUs. Have you looked at the lineup of Intel CPUs? There are now hundreds with extremely minor differences.

I think that it's about silicon lottery. Good chips are going to high-end CPUs, bad chips are going to cheap CPUs.

it's really not that hard for the consumer parts. until you get into the hedt range, each processor has better single threaded performance than all the price tiers below it and possibly more cores too. this get more complicated if you want to compare across multiple generations, but that's always the case.

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