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Comment by AussieWog93 | Hacker News Reader

To be fair, CPUs haven't improved a ridiculous amount either.

10 years ago, mainstream computers were being built with i5-2500ks in them. Now, for a similar price point you might be looking at a Ryzen 5 5600x. User Benchmark puts this at a 50-60% increase in effective 1/2/4 core workloads, and a 150-160% increase in 8 core workloads.

Compared to the changes in SSDs (64GB/128GB SATA3 being mainstream then, compared to 1TB NVMe now) or GPUs (Can an HD6850 and RTX 3060 even be compared!?), it's pretty meagre!

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https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Compare/Intel-Core-i5-2500K-vs... is the comparison you’re referring to.

I recall hearing a few years back that User Benchmark was wildly unreliable where AMD was involved, presenting figures that made them look much worse than they actually were. No idea of the present situation. I also vaguely recall the “effective speed” rating being ridiculed (unsure if this is connected with the AMD stuff or not), and +25% does seem rather ridiculous given that its average scores are all over +50%, quite apart from things like the memory speed (the i5-2500K supported DDR3 at up to 1333MHz, the 5600X DDR4 at up to 3200MHz).

An alternative comparison comes from PassMark, who I think are generally regarded as more reliable. https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-i5-2500K-vs-AMD-R... presents a much more favourable view of the 5600X: twice as fast single-threaded, and over 5.3× as fast for the multi-threaded CPU Mark.

In my experience; UserBenchmark will only show exactly one review per part, usually written early in the lifecycle, and never updated. Sometimes, this is written by random users (older parts), sometimes by staff. All reviews are basically trash, especially staff reviews.

Also, data fields like 64-Core Perf were made less prominent on Part Lists and Benchmark Result pages around the time Zen+ and Zen 2 All-Core outperformed comparable Intel parts. 1-Core Perf and 8-Core Perf were prioritized on highly visible pages, putting Intel on top of the default filtered list of CPUs.

However, the dataset produced by the millions of benchmarks remains apparently unmolested, and all the data is still visible going back a decade or more, if not slightly obscured by checkboxes and layout changes. (https://www.userbenchmark.com/UserRun/1)

Thanks for that. I'd always just taken them at face value, since they seem authoritative.

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