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Wuyley t1_j44i7ll wrote

Someone care to explain how an old fogey like myself can tell recent processors apart? Back in my day a Pentium 4 was better then a Pentium 3 and a 2.4 Ghz was better then a 2.3 Ghz.

Now everything is is an I3/5/7/9 regardless of what year it was made and its now "generations".

Is the best way to tell by looking at a I7 12th gen being better then a I7 13th? Do GHz even matter anymore?

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LukeLC t1_j44xvii wrote

While it's not super helpful, generation is the most useful singular spec to tell CPUs apart these days. Even the i3/i5/i7/i9 branding breaks down, since a 12th gen i3 can perform as well as an 11th gen i5.

GHz doesn't really matter anymore, except when comparing CPUs within the same generation.

To get a clear idea of what really differentiates one CPU from another, you pretty much have to look at benchmark scores. There's just too many variables to meaningfully compare on paper.

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OldBoyZee t1_j45fag2 wrote

They changed the naming convention a while ago, due to more stable release launch window and a specific project name. For ex. Skylake i3, vs coffee lake i3. They are different generations, but anyone can easily know its an i3. While the pentium was long running with many, many variations, if i recall, and they used to figure that out with ghz since it was a one and done core processor or dual core, etc.

Actually, amd had the same thing. They would just call their processors, zhambezi, or some weird name no one understood, but it was always ghz based due to oc and how many cores, even when the core processing sucked.

Personally, ghz matter little now, specially since most applications already use multiple cores and threads. Singular core stuff is more ghz related, and honestly, its good we made it past that stuff.

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WolfResponsible8483 t1_j45q98a wrote

> Personally, ghz matter little now, specially since most applications already use multiple cores and threads. Singular core stuff is more ghz related, and honestly, its good we made it past that stuff.

Single thread performance does matter.

Not everything can be multithreaded. Some algorithms are purely serial. Some can only really be split into 2 or 3 threads. See Amdahl's law

This is why Intel is still chasing it.

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OldBoyZee t1_j45qmkz wrote

Yah, i should have worded that better.

In general, single performance per core matter,but they arent the selling point like the old days where a single core would have x.x and the rest would throttle. Idk if im explaining it right.

Also, you are 100% right, intc is chasing that, the same way amd was before the ryzen series, but as mentioned above, it wont matter as much from a few .x difference, unless the architect could actually use it. Look at the 8350, or the 9000 series amd cpus that could easily overclock, but their performance per value was lackluster since their architecture was shit. Idk if Im explaining that right, but thats what was going through my brain in my prior reaponse.

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