Intel CPU Innovation.. or Lack Thereof?
Linus Tech Tips
·Linus Tech Tips
·2017-05-06
·
1,225 words · ~6 min read
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CPU Innovation is dead how many of you
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feel this way like every time you upgrade your computer you're saving 32
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cents on your power bill this month and not getting better performance in games
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creative applications or even just general
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usage well the thing about feelings is
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that they're difficult to quantify so we gathered up every top Intel CPU from the
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last 10 years put together an epic
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comparison for you performance power consumption
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thermals and price is innovation dead is
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it More Than A
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Feeling G fuel is the sugar-free Alternative Energy beverage that helps
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you maintain focus and endurance over long days and gaming sessions use our
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code at the link below let's start with our testing
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methodology we used the same video card on every platform even though the GTX
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1080 wasn't even a twinkle in Jensen's eye when the Pentium extreme Edition 955
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was the King of the Hill we did this because we wanted the main variable to
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be CPU performance rather than allowing this to turn into a comparison of of the
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best overall systems through the years
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with that said DDR memory has gone all
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the way from 667 MHz dual channel to
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over 2,000 MHz quad channel so our
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compromise there was to use a high-end RAM and motherboard combination that
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would have been typical at the time we went 10 years back and for every year
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picked out the first extreme Edition Intel CPU then for each one We performed
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the following tests temperature underload overall system power
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consumption in our Skybox stair test and
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we put it through a suite of modern CPU and gaming benchmarks though since this
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project already had me tunneling into the dark recesses of my past I was
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unable to resist benchmarking each CPU on halflife 2 as well using such old
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Hardware presented a few challenges not least of which was we had to use Windows
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7 on all of our builds to ensure driver
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and game support CPU Mark was the first
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test and the results were very boring
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since they were just numbers on a spreadsheet but then I had John turned
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it into a graph ha much better while the
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multi-threaded results that use all of the CPU's cores show incremental
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performance improvements the hidden story here is the single-threaded result
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where we see Intel's current 10 core Flagship the 6950x getting outperformed
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by chips going all the way back to 2011
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in y cruncher a benchmark that calculates 50 million digits of pi we
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tested in multi-threaded mode which gave us similar results to CPU Mark
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incremental improvements cinebench proved to be interesting as I initially
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expected the results would mimic CPU Mark but I was pleasantly surprised the
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6950x sat at the top as King in both
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multi-threading and single core tests
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with the oldest chip a Pentium on the
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bottom Lucky Dog onto our first real
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world Benchmark Adobe Media encoder again shows the older x79 chips with
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their higher single core clock speeds beating the
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6950x in the more commonly used GPU
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accelerated rendering method a video where we went more into this and why it
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happens can be found here each of the game benchmarks seemed
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to tell the same old story of incremental performance bumps rise of
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the Tomb Raider our modern game engine representative managed to scale through
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all generations only slowing down when
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going from 8 to 10 cores Crisis 3
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representing an older AAA engine improved very little pass the i7 965 as
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it is not a very multi-threaded title and then there was halflife 2 whose
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numbers don't show us much other than boring old incremental bumps but here
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are the results for Nostalgia purposes so yes for the most part each
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chip performed better than its predecessor but the margin of
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improvement from Chip to chip shows a steady downward Trend though I'm sure
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for some of you this didn't come as much of a surprise Intel has publicly stated
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their R&D is less focused on huge increases in processing power for
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Consumer PCS because they want to direct their attention to mobile data centers
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Internet of Things devices and the cloud
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so then CPU power draw and heat output
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which are very important to those markets that's way down on newer
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products right only sort of at idle
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power saving features have improved this dramatically but when working hard on
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the high end at least Intel has settled into a thermal and power budget they're
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comfortable with and they seem to be just adding more cores accordingly so
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efficiency is up that is performance per
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watt but your power draw while gaming will likely remain mostly
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unchanged let's look at pricing Trends now for an entire decade a, us give or
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take would get you the Pinnacle of Intel consumer engineering not so anymore
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they're asking a whopping $700 for their Flagship Enthusiast
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product so conclusion time then
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decreasing performance gains and increasing prices the rational human in
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me might point at the collapse of Moore's Law caused by the cost and
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difficulty of continuing to shrink silicon transistors and Intel's design
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goals that have shifted to address growing markets rather than shrinking
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ones to explain this but the conspiracy
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theorist and me noticed three things one
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after 2011 we stopped seeing large
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single core performance bumps from extreme Edition chips and after 2013 we
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stopped seeing tangible single core improvements in consumer chips at all
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two the last time AMD had a CPU in
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competition with Intel for the high in Market was in 2008 and three perhaps
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most incriminating the Intel logo looks
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suspiciously like the eye of a reptile turned on its
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side it's time for another Razer giveaway and today it's all about the
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Kraken Pro and 7.1 V2 headsets from
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Razer both models include 50 mm drivers
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lightweight frames a headband design for better weight distribution and less
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clamping Force larger interchangeable ear cushions that are softer and have
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better sound isolation fully retractable unidirectional microphones and the 7.1
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features 7.1 virtual surround sound over
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its USB connection it's got active noise cancelling and Razer chroma lighting as
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well we're giving away five of the pros as well as 1 7.1 as part of a six gaming
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bundle giveaway from Razer enter through the link in the video
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description so thanks for watching guys if this video sucked you know what to do
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but if it was awesome get subscribed hit that like button or even consider
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checking out our affiliate code links to where to buy CPUs at Amazon in the video
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description you can also buy a cool shirt like this one from our merch store
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or join our Forum which is freaking awesome all that is linked down below
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now that you're done doing all that stuff you're probably wondering what to watch next so click that little button
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in the top right corner to check out our latest Through the Ages or not latest
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this is the latest the previous one where we looked at CPU water blocks