Throw away an i7? That's a bit wasteful.
Currently for sale are generation 9 (9000), and these are even out the door soon. 10th gen is right around the corner.
Within these thousand series are the ACTUAL part numbers.
Ex: 9900K, 9980XE, etc.
These names are even more confusing but are what tell you the real power of a chip within the lineup for that year.
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2367?vs=2413
The newer i3 wins a few, and has much lower power consumption, but the old i7 wins more. Naturally the 2018 i7 thoroughly defeats the eight year old one (while using more power):
https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2258?vs=2413
But the generation is only one factor. Generational improvements don't always win over other factors like clock speed, cache size, core count, etc.
A recent desktop i3 is clearly faster: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2277?vs=2413
The i3-8121U is a low-power CPU. Low-power processors often end up in desktops like the Mac Mini (which doesn't use that specific model but has used U-series processors) or the Intel NUC (which uses that exact CPU):
https://www.newegg.com/intel-nuc-8-home-boxnuc8i3cysm1-stude...
Meanwhile the i3-8350K is the top end i3 which has the same number of cores and cache and a higher clock speed than the i7-2600K. No surprise it wins when the only thing it really lacks is hyperthreading, and even that causes it to lose some of the threaded tests.
The point was that e.g. an old quad core could often beat a new dual core. Every new dual core i3 is low-power, but if you want to see the 2600K acquitting itself well against a modern dual core "desktop" processor, here you are:
It does use considerable more power to do so — a few additional LED bulbs worth.
In general, processor performance has outpaced consumer needs for quite some time and most people could get along fine and performant with this 8 year old processor.
Citation: have and still use one, right next to my blown out 8700k system.
The 920 will bottleneck GPUs as slow as a GTX970 in some titles (PUBG, Rage 2 for example).
Great chip and still plenty for development/daily use, but IMO past its prime for gaming.
I also had to have expansion cards for USB 3.1 and SATA 3 which was annoying. NVMe is out of the question :(
I just see lots of people saying things like "still daily driving an abacus!" as if there's been no progress on CPU development in the last 10 years, and that's just false. Progress has _slowed_, but a modern Ryzen or i-Series is quantifiably better than older gear.
It is perfectly fine for my needs: mostly browsing, some video editing, and coding Perl.
Newer processors have more cores for sure, but if we look at single-core performance there isn't so much difference, and my almost 8 years old overclocked i7 runs probably faster for a single threaded application than a new 16 core Ryzen.
Of course if we talk about multi threaded workflows a newer CPU is better.
It's running Kubuntu and I'm running the latest versions of everything on this -- Chrome, RStudio, etc. -- and it runs plenty fast. I have a Windows 10 computer at work with the latest i7 chip which feels slightly faster, but not that much.
Most software these days aren't CPU-bound but IO bound. I got the most performance boost upgrading to an SSD and upping the RAM to 8 GB.
If you run Linux, you can have a very comfortable experience running on hardware from yesteryears. Throwing out a perfectly good machine is a waste.