• Competitor rules

    Please remember that any mention of competitors, hinting at competitors or offering to provide details of competitors will result in an account suspension. The full rules can be found under the 'Terms and Rules' link in the bottom right corner of your screen. Just don't mention competitors in any way, shape or form and you'll be OK.

When will we see a CPU thats double the performance of a 5 year old cpu?

jonneymendoza

jonneymendoza

jonneymendoza

Caporegime
Joined
7 Apr 2008
Posts
26,004
Location
Lorville - Hurston
As the title says when will we finally see a CPU worth upgrading over a 5 year old i7 920?

I ask this because since then,all we have been getting is little minor performance boost "clock for clock" and i am worried that CPU tech has reached its limits and can no longer go any faster anymore.

i ave a 920 but see no benefit whatsoever in upgrading to a haswell or whatever is the current gen because clock for clock it is not even 50% faster then my CPU!

Toss in the fact that not many games and apps utilise my own CPU makes u wonder what the hell is going on?

Soon we will see mobile phone CPU's perform on par with desktop CPU's!!!
 
I'm in the middle of upgrading to a hex core at the moment. I don't expect to replace it until octo core is in Intel's mainstream socket, which could be a good 5 years away I guess if not more.
 
I'm confused - do you want clockspeed or performance per clock or what?

Also, depending on how fast you're running the 920 you can get processors that will more than double it's performance in some applications e.g. 3DMark 11 or Firestrike physics vs a 4930k, both stock.

That said, I agree it's still been a bit slower on progress :(
 
I think the question is what do you consider performance improvement. Although much emphasis is on the raw clock speed some features in newer CPU's can result in huge gains in application performance. For example a application that utilises the latest AVX you would notice a vast improvement in performance on a chip today vs 5 years ago. However if you use applications that are old or not developed to use what's available then you will hardly see a benefit even if they were shipping with 4.5GHZ.
 
Ive used Haswell pc's for example on photoshop, lightroom and gaming. Compared to my 920 setup there is no difference in performances and the benchmarks dont lie either.

Games depend on 99% on GPU and apps like photoshop/lightroom dont benefit from a haswell over a 920.

running your bog standard benchmarks also shows that haswell is barely 40% faster if that clock for clock...
 
Still rocking an i7 930 myself, no problems running current games at maximum and I bought it mid 2010. I planned to upgrade to Broadwell but it isn't quite the chip we thought it was so I'll delay my CPU upgrade till next year and see what Skylake has to offer.
 
I started a thread along similar lines a few months ago - using an i5 750 at the moment myself and scratching my head as to what to upgrade to, don't think i'll get £300 worth of performance boost out of any current gen Intel CPUs :(

(remembering fondly upgrading from a K6-2/III to Duron/Athlon | P4 to Core 2 Duo | etc)
 
Last edited:
Yeah its true the jumps are not much, but I spend a lot of my time video editing for my job so CPU performance makes a larger difference here 3.5 hours instead of 5 for example, but to me, NOTHING is fast enough yet and probably wont be for another 10 years, by this I mean compile a video, render in 1 minute then play it back see how she looks :D haha......but no, that doesnt work lol...........I run a i7 3770k at 4.6ghz with 32gb ram..............pondering jumping over to a i7 4930k, but money is to much :(, I know the 2 extra cores will help but its not a 'massive' upgrade persay
 
jonneymendoza said:
Ive used Haswell pc's for example on photoshop, lightroom and gaming. Compared to my 920 setup there is no difference in performances and the benchmarks dont lie either.

Games depend on 99% on GPU and apps like photoshop/lightroom dont benefit from a haswell over a 920.

running your bog standard benchmarks also shows that haswell is barely 40% faster if that clock for clock...
Click to expand...

BARELY 40% faster That's a lot faster :p :p
 
Combat squirrel said:
Yeah its true the jumps are not much, but I spend a lot of my time video editing for my job so CPU performance makes a larger difference here 3.5 hours instead of 5 for example, but to me, NOTHING is fast enough yet and probably wont be for another 10 years, by this I mean compile a video, render in 1 minute then play it back see how she looks :D haha......but no, that doesnt work lol...........I run a i7 3770k at 4.6ghz with 32gb ram..............pondering jumping over to a i7 4930k, but money is to much :(, I know the 2 extra cores will help but its not a 'massive' upgrade persay
Click to expand...

In 10 years time 4k atleast will be mainstream, so your vidoes will be larger so you will still be struggling :P
 
I went from an overclocked i5 750 to my current oc'd 2500k and yeah I agree tbh, hardly any noticeable difference in performance whatsoever for my usage. The only reason I upgraded was because I got this setup (cpu + mobo) very cheap.

I'm currently thinking of moving over to a 4770k setup but I'm not prepared to pay the current going rate because it simply isn't worth it at all, to me. If a bargain (or what I consider to be a bargain :P) comes along I'll go for it but it looks unlikely for a while yet.
 
Now the consoles have had a hardware refresh I'd expect some improvements to clock speeds on PC. It's generally what's been one of the main driving forces before.

We're getting kinda close to the limits of silicon now though (hence why it's all about adding power per clock rather than more GHz these days).
 
At stock speeds the 4790 is almost twice as fast as the 920 (86%-92%)?

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/47?vs=1199

Less than half of that is the speed bump (3.6 vs 2.66 GHz). Clock-for-clock it's 37% faster. Not to be sniffed at for a bit over £200.

You seem to be disappointed with 40% gains from efficiency in 5 years but I think that's pretty impressive, especially when you also add in the energy efficiency.
 
Last edited:
joeyjojo said:
You seem to be disappointed with 40% gains from efficiency in 5 years but I think that's pretty impressive, especially when you also add in the energy efficiency.
Click to expand...

I think most people's frustrations are down to the fact that we - as the enthusiast market - don't give two sh*ts about energy efficiency, leave that to the tablet / mobile / laptop users. For desktop at home, performance is king and we've been spoilt since the days of the 486 with frequent, significant performance boosts (at roughly the same price)
 
Still rocking on my i920 D0 from 2009. Still works great as has been clocked @4.2Ghz since I've had it. Certainly a golden CPU.

Have to say it would be nice to finally have a upgrade. . .
 
dvs8 said:
I think most people's frustrations are down to the fact that we - as the enthusiast market - don't give two sh*ts about energy efficiency, leave that to the tablet / mobile / laptop users. For desktop at home, performance is king and we've been spoilt since the days of the 486 with frequent, significant performance boosts (at roughly the same price)
Click to expand...

You don't seem to realise that the performance and the energy efficiency go together. 10 years ago you might buy a P4 570: single core, 3.8 GHz, 115 W. Now you can buy an i5 4570: four cores, 3.2 GHz, 84 W. Imagine trying to stick four P4s together and cool it - it would be impossible. And the 4570 is a good deal more than 4 times as fast, but there's only so much you can gain from efficiency.

CPUs have only really got faster (in the last 10 years) due to miniaturisation. It lets you have more cores, more cache, more transistors, and shorter pipelines, while maintaining ~ 100 W of heat output that a small heatsink can reasonably be expected to handle.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.
Back
Top Bottom