Sure, it's not the same as 486 vs Pentium, but the Ivy Bridge-era CPUs that were used for such a long time are now equivalent to low-end CPUs, it's no longer universally better to get an old i7 vs a new i5. That said, if you're happy, there's no reason to upgrade.
It's also using MORE electricity from the wall, as the old PowerEdge T20 system was an ATX12VO design with a Xeon 1275L.
I'll extend your comment to say that old i7 is universally better than new i3 (and I should have known better).
But the power consumption has dropped, heat generation has dropped (a lot of it because they abandoned FIVR), IGP performance has increased and they started supporting DDR4, so overall performance has increased.
I personally lament the death of the mobile socket. I hope AMD still has socketed mobile processors, but I doubt it. They're only useful for people who want to upgrade or fix their laptops themselves, people who want to resell their old laptop/parts, and the environment.
> Minor changes
There have been absolutely massive gains in desktop performance, if you're doing CPU bound tasks locally with work can be split across cores the high number of cores that are now available. The performance for my workloads is about 4x what it was, from 7 years ago, for the same price.
> Ryzen 7 5800U as its most efficient mobile processor to date, citing 21.4 hours battery life on a 53 Wh battery during 1080p video playback with Wi-Fi on, or 17.5 hours in MobileMark 2018’s battery life test
Does it matter? Doesn't wifi use specialized hardware?
Do you do PC gaming on Stadia or is that all Chromecast+TV type gaming? Personally I'm much more of a PC gamer, and while I don't have the experience to have an opinion on Stadia, I'm currently assuming having good hardware locally is the better experience.
That said, it is definitely not true in the case of server hardware.
I have a home lab with a few R620s that have 2014 era Xeons in them, and while there are a lot of parallel cores, single core performance is abysmal compared to newer in-class hardware. For CPU-bound single-threaded tasks, I actually spin up a Linode and use that, rather than my on-prem hardware.
I would also note, I have only Intel. I'm going to build an AMD rig here within the next few months though because I've had numerous people tell me that it's noticeably better.
in reality, even in intel land much progress has been made in single-thread performance and even more for multi-thread.
take a look at these benchmarks comparing a 4770k (4C/8T) against a 10700k (8C/16T), both launching at $350: https://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/2659?vs=2664
Intel CPUs still give 16 PCI lanes on the consumer chips, despite any modern graphics card using that entirely.
(Meaning your nvme drives all compete somewhat).
Compared to phones which have real, huge, generational improvements every couple of years which is sometimes jarring.
However, this is different.
AMDs previous Ryzen laptop line performed incredibly well, both in power consumption (which equates to battery life) and thermal envelope (which, also equates to battery life) while also delivering jaw dropping performance.
I am a “devops” and farm out a lot of compute to the cloud, but that comes at a cost (iteration times, price, bandwidth, not all flows can be remote). And gaming does too (stadia has mixed results- though I am a fan).
I would posit that your workflow has become remote likely _because_ of this stagnation.
I still have a 6700k which is plenty fast enough for anything I do. But in reality it's quickly getting outpaced by Zen. The only reason Intel has been getting faster in the past few years is because of Zen and now Intel is shitting the bed.
The next few years, especially because of Apple Silicon, are going to be really interesting for desktop processors. I think we're going to see some really crazy innovations.
That’s H-class APUs, since you were talking about an Intel MQ. The U-class APUs seem to be surprisingly close in performance, mostly only 10–20% slower, with a third of the TDP.
I knew I was getting a big architectural jump when I bought the Sandybridge, but I wouldn't have believed you if you told me that in ten years I would still be happy with its performance and still using it.
Low power mobile chips were dual core until Q3 2017 when Kaby Lake refresh was released and brought 4 cores to the i5 and i7 line-up. Even then, entry level and mainstream versions (i3 in particular) remained dual core configs.
Not to mention network speeds even at the consumer end are slowly increasing. So having enough beef to push 1 gigabit NICs is good but planning for the future and adding 2.5 gb or higher is better. And finally having enough compute to layer fq_codel or better on top along with some monitoring all adds up.
Like a lot of projects the demand will act like a gas and fill whatever volume is given to it. Given more compute I'll find a way to use it. :-)
I'm using I5-2500K's for firewalls. 1 gigabit hardly moves the CPU usage. I have all NIC offload turned off.
Btw. I would really consider OPNsense instead if you are building custom firewalls. Pfsense is an atrocious company. Trying to kill off OPNsense by buying domains that tell lies and AFAIK no one outside Netgate can actually build from source. They are not open source even though they claim so. They are also moving to using DRM.
I've been drag racing various operating systems after my little protectli box proved only capable of pushing 500Mbit/s using PFSense + FreeBSD. Even the usual TCP tuning tricks didn't help. Meanwhile every OS I've tried except OpenBSD proved able to saturate a dedicated one gigabit link in a VM under ESXi.
I will definitely try OPNsense next!
Your CPU is a 4C/8T 47W one. Not bad for being in a laptop. My Thinkpad for example is a 2C/4T 25W one, from the 7xxxU series. Which doesn't feel snappy at all.
Your CPU would probably be handily beat by a recent 4-core or 6-core Ryzen, and it would be done so while outputting far less heat and fan noise.
From geekbench you CPU has: 780 single-core, 2784 multi-core. For a 25W Ryzen 5 4500U: 1079 single-core, 4260 multi-core.
I ran a 4700mq from when it came out. I waited to a similar processor to come out that was better. took a long while and I upgraded to an 8750h because it had more cores and was being sold in 500-600$ machines. There is now an 8 core chip of the same quality that i the next to most recent intel generation, this will be my next upgrade. My 4700mq machine runs win10 and ubuntu linux just fine. I dont do heavy compute work on it anymore, but I did back when it was current.