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Comment by bhouston | Hacker News Reader

This "stagnation" is nothing like the stagnation during AMD's poorly performing Bulldozer era (the post Athlon era) where they were consistently beat by Intel's offerings and there was a general lack of innovation in the prosumer space.

During that era for the most part Intel's i7 prosumer CPUs started with 4 cores with the Bloomfield Nehalem chips in 2008 (which at the time were awesome and a game changer) and ended with 4 cores with the Kaby Lake-S in 2017. It really only changed in 2017 with AMD Ryzen forcing Intel to actually increase core count.

2008 Nehalem benchmark: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/778/IntelR-CoreTM-i7...

2017 Kaby Lake-S benchmark: https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/Intel-Core-i7-7700/Rating/3887

When I compare the two, it shows an effective 20% speed increase, although microbenchmarks show a 50% increase. That is a stagnation.

During that era it felt like a lost decade. I don't miss it.

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Not saying you're wrong, because intel stagnation was very real, but please don't use userbenchmark as a source of numbers for anything. They're a terrible source with biased benchmarks and reporting. Just look at the dribble they write for basically any AMD product on their site (https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/1817839/AMD-Ryzen-7-..., or this https://cpu.userbenchmark.com/SpeedTest/2081998/AMD-Ryzen-7-... which just find-and-replaces half the 5800X3D comments).

Or when AMD started adding more cores to desktop chips and they changed the "overall score" calculation from 30% single, 60% quad, 10% multi to 40% single, 58% quad, 2% multi.

Not only was that the opposite of computing trends, and just there to spite AMD, the new system had results like an i3-9350KF being overall faster than an i9-9980XE.

Likewise, please don't use Cinebench. It's a poor general purpose CPU benchmark that first favored Zen architecture (many slow cores) and now favors Intel's Raptor Lake. It's hand optimized for x86 instructions and is highly parallel, which is not how most applications run.

Use Geekbench instead of Cinebench or Userbenchmark.

>It's a poor general purpose CPU benchmark that first favored Zen architecture (many slow cores) and now favors Intel's Raptor Lake.

Would you advise the same if the colors were reversed?

The majority of people here are AMD fanbois, so it's sometimes hard to discern whether something is rooted in objectivity or subjectivity.

If you're an AMD fanboy, you'd only care about Cinebench despite the fact that its results do not correlate with gaming or other common applications such as browsing, Excel, video editing, etc.

There's a reason why x86 CPU users will only want to compare Apple Silicon using Cinebench. It's because Cinebench uses Intel Embree, which is hand optimized for x86 instructions. It's like testing Ryzen or Core CPUs on software optimized for ARM instructions, and then making a conclusion on how fast they are for x86 applications.

Use Geekbench.

Ideally you would run a suite of various benchmarks and workloads and pass judgment on the overall results, rather than basing it on just one specific test or another. They're all going to be biased one way or another.

You also didn't answer my question: Would you likewise advise against Cinebench if the colors were reversed? As it is, you're advising against Cinebench just because it favors Intel.

I’m advising against cinebench for any general purpose CPU testing. Far too many people, YouTubers, and hardware websites draw conclusion about the speed of the CPU and perf per watt using only Cinebench.

I can drink to that. No singular test is going to give a complete picture.

Geekbench generally lines up with SPEC, the industry standard. (at least for consumer stuff)

What the hell is that write up? I never noticed that before but it makes userbenchmark look really bad.

Can confirm, I bought a pair of desktops for work in 2012 with Ivy Brige i7's that could "turbo boost" to 3.9 GHz indefinitely without overclock. I did not feel a real upgrade need until the 32 core Threadripper machines came out in 2018.

I only just upgraded from my i5 3570K to a Ryzen 7 5800X3D.

Not because anything I was currently doing with my computer was becoming too slow, but because I wanted to do new things (VR). A shame, I wanted to run that thing into the ground.

I've got my old system sat spare, I'm not sure what to do with it.

my i7-4790 served me nicely for 8 years. Only upgraded because now most games were CPU-limited, even on "only" GTX 1070. But I went "all in" "I don't want to upgrade for quite a long time" with 7800X3D. Maybe GPU upgrade in 2-3 years...

Did something similar a bit ago with the 5900X and a 6900XT. Wonderful setup, low wattage, quiet, performant.

Just lost it to a fire and not sure what to replace it with, alas. Too busy in the aftermath to justify building and parting stuff independently, so that probably leaves me with an off the shelf or a workstation + GPU combo.

Yikes. What started the fire?

Still under investigation, alas. First guess was a popped lithium battery downstairs but the fire dept has ruled that out now.

I’m sorry you went/are going through that.

I know you said it’s been ruled out, but I sometimes wonder if I should worry more about aging lithium batteries in older devices… the oldest ones (e.g. 2000s handhelds) are now old enough to be retro-cool and therefore worth keeping for nostalgia, but they’re also a bit scary.

Have you seen the recent Gamers Nexus videos on CPU overvolting and catching on fire? You should update your BIOS to prevent potential further damage.

That issue currently appears to be relevant only to the AM5 series boards and CPUs. The 5900X is an AM4 part.

I was replying to a comment mentioning a 7800X3D.

Nice processor choice... vrchat in mind? Haha

Yeah, but mostly Neos which loves all that L3 cache.

This is true. The Intel 4-core era lasted a staggering 10 years due to no competition.

Today, it seems like CPU competition is a live again with Intel, AMD, Apple, Ampere, ARM, Graviton, RISV, Qualcomm, etc.

Userbenchmark is fairly useless for CPU performance, though. Their results are often completely nonsensical.

the one good thing to come out of that era was the "moar cores" meme

heh... https://9gag.com/gag/aRPw3xM

he's wearing a silly hat because it's predated by this https://www.reddit.com/r/gaming/comments/tc4aw/make_more_hat...

Checking in as the awesome game changer.

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