jmke

As any ‘family source of computer information’ will testify, every so often a family member will want an upgrade. Over the final few months of 2012, I did this with my brother’s machine, fitting him out with a Sandy Bridge CPU, an SSD and a good GPU to tackle the newly released Borderlands 2 with, all for free. The only problem he really had up until that point was a dismal FPS in RuneScape.

The system he had been using for the two years previous was an old hand-me-down I had sold him – a Core2Duo E6400 with 2x2 GB of DDR2-800 and a pair of Radeon HD4670s in Crossfire. While he loves his new system with double the cores, a better GPU and an SSD, I wondered how much of an upgrade it had really been.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6670/d...for-an-upgrade

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jmke

nice test, as mentioned in the comments there, would have been nice to see some more general usage benchmarks (playing youtube HD, opening itunes etc)
but gives a good impression of what to expect a 4-6 year old PC.

it also pretty much underlines the impression I've had about PC industry and leverage on raw CPU power. Since introduction of C2D in 2006 CPU power (single threaded) has stagnated A LOT.


Pentium 4 660 released Q1 2005 vs Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 released Q3 2007
http://www.bench.anandtech.com/bench/Product/59?vs=92
Overall E6850 is 140% faster than Pentium 4 660. (or ~70% per year)

Intel Core 2 Duo E6850 vs Intel Core i7 970 released Q3 2010 (3 years later!)
http://www.bench.anandtech.com/bench/Product/59?vs=157
Overall i7 970 is 33% faster than E6850.

Core i7 970 vs Intel Core i7 3960X released Q4 2011 (i7 3970X released Q4 2012 is slightly faster... but not in single thread)
http://www.bench.anandtech.com/bench/Product/443?vs=157
Overall Core i7 3960X is 16% faster than Core i7 970.

Core tech boosted performance ~140% over previous generation and product. And this in 2006.
7 years later... we've seen a 50% boost. This is average of 7-8% increase per year since 2006.

imagine if the 50-100% boost remained since that Core 2 Duo Release.

SYSMark 2007 - Overall in 2007: 186
SYSMark 2007 - Overall in 2008: 316
SYSMark 2007 - Overall in 2009: 537
SYSMark 2007 - Overall in 2010: 913
SYSMark 2007 - Overall in 2011: 1553
SYSMark 2007 - Overall in 2012: 2640
SYSMark 2007 - Overall in 2013: 4489

in reality we see the fastest CPU hitting ~300 in Sysmark 2007.
in imagination we would have seen CPUs been 15x faster than what we currently have. One can dream.

One can also understand that since 2006 testing CPUs has become less interesting

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