Tracing Intel's Atom Journey: Goldmont Plus
chipsandcheese.com
chipsandcheese.com
The one discussed in the article has a similar performance with 1/10th the power consumption: https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Celeron+J4125...
As usual, I think CPUs got "fast enough" for the majority of applications long ago, and it's only software inefficiency that has driven the need for more powerful hardware.
Sandy Bridge's staying power even became a meme in Japan, with Sandy Bridge users refusing to upgrade due to lack of need becoming known as "Uncle Sandy" (サンディーおじさん, Sandy-ojisan).
At this point the only reasons to upgrade are one of two things: Software legitimately pushing the performance envelope, like vidja gaemz; and software demanding more resources for no good fucking reason.
A 13 year old CPU should definitely struggle to keep up with just the basic electron based chat applications we use today, which is only one piece of software that most need to use. There is still no incentive for startups/VC funded companies to make their software more performant.
I'll say the biggest bottleneck is the old igpu, but I solved that using a cheap 1030. The performance it's a lot better than a current low end intel (with the main drawback being the power draw).
>and software demanding more resources for no good fucking reason.
That said, Discord runs just fine on my Sandy Bridge machines if I actually need to do so.
I don't think I'd want to run a 2700k today unless there were no other computers available.
Aside from forced Windows 7 obsolescence, it can do practically everything except play the very latest games just fine. If I could have been bothered to downgrade the Windows 7 install to Windows 10 it would have been even more useful to this day.
from the 2700k I went to the 7600k, and now to the AMD 7900x. I sold the 2700k a long time ago, but I still have the 7600k machine somewhere. I should get rid of it.
There's a glut of Skylakes that can't run Windows 11, however, for cheap, and those certainly have some value on the budget side.
So "and software demanding more resources for no good fucking reason.".
You're really just reinforcing the parent's point.
I dispute this - I had an i5-2500K (which is a 4 core, Sandy Bridge processor) that I upgraded about two years. But I didn't upgrade for performance reasons (I was still gaming on it!), but rather because one of my ram sticks had gotten crashy and I wanted to try building a mITX computer instead. It would definitely still be plenty for a lot of use cases. I still have the 2500k and motherboard sitting in a box, just in case someone desperately needs a computer.
Compared to my M2 macbook pro, it’s fine. The mac uses 10% as much electricity, but the desktop runs cool and quiet anyway.
Software-hardware coevolution in practice.
When the first dual cores appeared, they were dual hardware cores... in a software world that was designed to operating with a time-sliced single core.
It felt like magic!
However, now most pieces of heavy software can use multiple cores, so you need 'one more core' to get the same level of surplus capacity.
Also, the typical load of multiple tabs open with modern js web apps is much heavier than anything that would have been running constantly then.
In the 90s, 00s, you closed down your background programs if you needed to run something important.
And so you only really found it in really cheap use cases, and almost everyone ignored it.
But in the context of Gracemont and Crestmont (which are very interesting products, and a massive departure from intel's traditional uArch), Goldmont plus' uArch becomes very interesting, because it's forgotten a stepping stone along the way.
For example, Goldmont Plus has a massive pre decode cache, which kind of makes sense given Intel's plans to add twin decoder clusters to Tremont (and later triple decode clusters to Skymont). Except, Tremont deleted it, I guess that means the idea didn't work out... Again, because this is far from the first time that someone experimented with pre decoding x86.
Those Amber Lake Y chips were the bees knees. 5W Core CPUs -- these were the last. Ice Lake and Tiger Lake were 7W at last and then the low power Alder Lake CPUs only contain E cores so they are just renamed Atom CPUs. Which is visible from the N series numbering, too.
The Intel spec for these chips says only 8GB of RAM, but they're dual channel and I find they'll actually run 32GB just fine. The newer N-series processors everyone seems to like are actually kind of inferior in that regard, since they're single channel and apparently really only do 16GB of RAM.