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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

CPUs have not gotten significantly faster in the last couple years, especially at the high end.

Back in Q1 2010 I got an Intel Core i7 980X which benchmarked at 8911 according to http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7+X+980+...

Now in Q2 2013 (3 years later) the very top of the line processor available, an Intel Xeon E5-2690 v2, is only twice as fast at 16164: http://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Xeon+E5-2690+v...

It used to be that things got faster at a much faster rate. And until this new E5-2690 v2 was released, the fastest CPU was only 14000 or so, which is less than 2x as fast.

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Anandtech has a nice analysis of the progression of CPUs over the last 9 years: http://www.anandtech.com/show/7003/the-haswell-review-intel-...

Depending on what you're doing with CPUs there have been improvements, even at the high end between Nehalem and Haswell (on the Intel side). Anandtech's data shows a nearly 2x improvement between those generations for certain tasks.

But the reality is that for other tasks (e.g. the winrar compression benchmark) the speedup is minimal compared to previous years (see Haswell vs Prescott). In many cases where there is a speedup, performance is already so good that you wouldn't notice.

It's pretty crazy to see that in the consumer world, not even games are demanding so much performance from our CPUs.

CPUs are actually getting slower after overclocking

I have water cooled 2600k at 5GHz running 24/7. Bigger GPU and more cores brings additional complexity and more heat. No other CPU can handle this without blowing up.

Does it perform faster in benchmarks than later CPUs overclocked to their lower maximums? Clock speed alone is not a good indicator.

Yes, it does. Newer CPUs have cheaper thermal paste.

You know you're allowed to use your own thermal paste right? Intel won't mind.

If you plan on overclocking your CPU it's probably a good idea to get a slightly better CPU cooler than the standard one anyway.

Cheap thermal paste is under heat sink, I would have to crack open CPU with razor blade. And even after this operation 2600K is better.

Can you give an example of a faster rate in the past?

The jump from Pentium 4 to Core2Duo. You could go from a typical Penitum 4 in 2004 to a new C2D in 2006 and get a major performance boost.

The C2D to i7 jump was pretty significant as well.

It was pretty typical to get +4x performance in less than 2 years before after an upgrade cycle. The problem is that encryption standards aren't increasing at a logarithmic rate like CPUs were, so DoD had to step in and adjust the marketplace. By 2010, it was well known in certain cirles that the i7 would be the last serious CPU in the desktop space, that future CPUs would be targeted to cloudian budgets and applications, where they can be managed and hidden away from people who might use real modern cpus you've may have heard about like Tile-x that are used by NSA to do the very thing they were afraid normal people might do, like break https, farm personal data and use it to affect the market, and basically have control over their lives outside of the financial system. Now that surveillance state is complete, they don't really have to worry about drug dealers breaking away from the financial system anymore.

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