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gthtjtkt

> 3ghz core i7

I hope Apple hasn't succeeded in reducing processor comparisons to these two useless tidbits of information...

Based on just "3GHz core i7", a chip could either be painfully out of date or current top of the line.

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> Based on just "3GHz core i7", a chip could either be painfully out of date or current top of the line.

This has always bothered me too. I suspect that the ambiguity is intentional on the part of Intel and/or Apple marketing (though I'm not savvy enough to know why exactly).

Linus mentions it in one of his videos. The idea is that Intel doesn't want you worried about the generation, only whether it's i3/i5/i7. I guess this helps them mask over the fact that, year on year, CPUs aren't really getting any faster in single-threaded performance.

How does that makes sense? Isn't it beneficial to Intel that you WANT the latest gen regardless of how little it progressed from the previous gen?

Laptops are much more expensive than CPUs. I'm not likely to buy a whole new laptop just because Intel introduced a new generation.

However, if my laptop is old and slow, and I'm already in the market for a new computer, I can easily be convinced to buy the computer with the "bigger numbers". Buying i7 instead of i5 only a small part of the full price, so why not?

Yes, and they way they do that is by obscuring the performance and hoping you'll assume processor speed is still advancing as quickly as it did in the 90s and early 2000s.

Why is single threaded performance important?

When I think about my daily work - it is very multi-threaded:

* parallel builds

* video running in chrome

* a zillion tabs open

What I really care about is battery life.

Because the UI is single threaded, I think. i.e. the actual drawing of a button press or menu call up.

Because a lot of things still aren't or can't be multi threaded, most notably game engines.

I think I'd argue that game engines are implementing and running multi-threaded engines a heck of a lot these days - to the extent that if a game _is_ heavily using a single core, you'll see complaints.

I would be exceptionally surprised to see any of the higher-budget games running on a single thread. Low-budget indie games less so.

Personally, I've found that a good benchmark for "what is happening in most games" is the lowest common denominator - consoles.

Having said this, you might be arguing that it's hard to split everything out equally in a game - but it's far more likely that threads are created for the stuff that can be - physics calculations, sound, etc. (the stuff that might have, in the past, be split out to dedicated hardware)

The latter, from what I understand most engines are multi threaded only in the sense that multiple threads are running stuff, one thread for sound, one thread for simulation etc, and that the graphics processing (still the bottleneck in most games) is still mostly single threaded, at least until it get's to the GPU.

> CPUs aren't really getting any faster in single-threaded performance.

They are, though slowly. The skylakes are a bit faster than the broadwells are a bit faster than the haswells, etc.

Yeah there's a massive difference between the Haswell i7 (2015) in my workstation at home and the Sandy Bridge i7 (2011) in my workstation at the office.

The old CPU's sharing a name with the new CPU's makes them sound like they're still up-to-date. Which I guess is great for making you feel better about your old device? This seems potentially detrimental to sales though, so I still don't understand the impetus for marketing them like that.

By the same logic, you could complain that VW sells people new Golfs that have nothing to do with the original VW Golf from 1974.

It's an entirely usual thing to maintain marketing names between generations because the marketing name is rather a description of the target audience than of the concrete feature set or technical specs.

Yeah, I still have a Nehalem at work and it's nuts how much slower it is than my Haswell at home (which is getting a little old itself).

Linus Torvalds?

There's some YouTube tech review guy whose name is Linus.

Probably Linus Tech Tips, the YouTuber

Linus Sebastian

No, Linus van Pelt.

Sibling poster stefantalpalaru you appear to be hell banned

No, it's a famous youtuber specializing in hardware news/reviews: https://www.youtube.com/user/LinusTechTips

I wish they'd just start using i73970 or i57600k or whatever, thats what most hardcore users look at anyway

Slight sidetrack: there's no TDP there either.

We know that i7 in this case refers to the laptop class processor because of the article. If taken out of context, then this information is even more useless.

Even at the same generation, a laptop class i7 is roughly on par with a desktop class i3.

For anything above Haswell the only things that matter are core count, frequency and whether it has hyperthreading. There haven't been any notable improvements to per-core perf since Haswell.

I also have the same impression. Looking at various Passmark CPU benchmarks Hardwell has been the last big upgrade (but also only when considering battery usage). Since Haswell I have seen any major must have big improvement. It would be great if Intel will develop a true 4 core i7 processor with TDP like 18-28W... I also have the feeling Intel is getting lazy (since the have the monopoly on mobile desktop CPUs). Especially when comparing speed of innovation to ARM mobile phone processors.

Really? I was under the impression that even across the generations there still isn't much of a speed up.

There's very significant variance in # of cores, cache size, and TDP. The specific GHz number no longer matters as much as all of them combined.

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/processors/core/core-...

All 13" rMBP are dual core, all 15" rMBP are quad core.

Microarchitecture governs single-thread performance as well. For most users I suspect single-thread performance (oversimplified as: IPC + GHz?) and cache size will be the largest distinguishing performance features. Developers may care about larger core counts for large builds.

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