121–130 of 142 posts
Apple understood this from the word go and I don’t understand why everyone else is struggling so much: M 1 Pro ^ ^ ^ Form Gen Intra-gen Factor Differentiator Admittedly, the Pro/Max/Ultra names are arbitrary, but it’s still easier to pronounce and understand than “Intel Core i9-10900K”
i5 10 700k ^ ^ ^ Bracket Gen In gen differentiator
I’ve been out of the enthusiast game since the P4. I understand that an i5 is better than an i3 and worse than an i7. Outside of that I’m totally lost. Different core counts, different kinds of cores, multiple clock speeds (minimum, normal, max, ultra-boost), etc. and of course a current i3 probably destroys an older i7 in benchmarks. GPUs aren’t quite as bad. A 3060 is better than a 2060, but is a 3060 better than a…
> I understand that an i5 is better than an i3 and worse than an i7. That isn't always true. It's pushed by intel as a "handy reference" for specifications, when it's actually just a price bracket. Many noobs will see it as a three-level hierarchy and conclude that they need an i7 for their mundane office work, when a pentium would have sufficed. You gotta read and understand the specifications. AMD has an actually u…
Here's my question. Why are there SO MANY PROCESSOR SKUs? https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/platforms/d... I lost count at 75 SKUs for Cascade Lake. Do we need 2-core increments? Do we need 0.2 GHz increments? Is this just part of the binning process? Wouldn't it make it easier for everyone if they had 1/4 the amount? I'm trying to think of the amount of manhours wasted in meetings where IT staff debat…
Here's my question. Why are there SO MANY PROCESSOR SKUs? https://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/products/platforms/d... I lost count at 75 SKUs for Cascade Lake. Do we need 2-core increments? Do we need 0.2 GHz increments? Is this just part of the binning process? Wouldn't it make it easier for everyone if they had 1/4 the amount? I'm trying to think of the amount of manhours wasted in meetings where IT staff debat…
Brands are just going bananas trying to get rid of their own identity for some reason. It's the same as Land Rover(JLR) announcing that they won't call their cars land rover anymore, "because customers find it confusing". Apparently according to their spokesperson "no one says they own a Land Rover Defender, it's just a Defender". Like.....everyone ok in the head over there at the HQ?
Really bizarre practice that doesn't actually make it easier for the consumer, as the year of release becomes the number instead.
No one really does a nice job of this, once the marketing department gets hold its all "super/ultra/maximum/titanium/silver/gold/plantinum/diamond" etc These words have lost all meaning. No its not just Intel, its literally every single consumer cpu and gpu maker.
As someone who keeps tabs on the products I can pretty quickly get an intuition for what they mean, but the semantics do no favors. They're just placeholders for 'better' and 'best' when used in various combinations. But once you stop labeling the base model (such as plainly 'Macbook') you're not qualifying what the marketing term is trying to convey (what is it 'better' than?). 'Air' as opposed to...? 'Pro' compared to...a product you no longer sell? 'Ultra' or 'Plus' for phones but 'Pro' for desktop OSs?
If you tried to chart out the marketing terms used in the tech hardware industry it would look like the Always Sunny Charlie Conspiracy meme.
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> somebody who has 0 clue what any computer/laptop specification means whatsoever Life was so easy in the MHz-wars days. The bigger number was basically always better, and you could easily tell by how much.
Nope, the IPC was hugely different in the MHZ wars days. Pentium III had 20% higher IPC than Pentium 4 Northwood; AMD K8 (Athlon 64) had 35% higher IPC than Pentium 4 Prescott. Same in the RISC vs CISC days: Pentium had 33% higher IPC than the original PowerPC 601. Late generation RISCs like Alpha were a completely different beast again, with the DEC Alpha 21264 (EV6) having 25% higher IPC than Pentium III. It was ne…
The P4 is what killed the MHz Wars in my memory. It was clear it couldn’t keep clicking up and it’s poor performance relative to existing chips at similar clock speeds (as you noted) meant the game was over.
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Huh? From the very start through gen 7 the tiers were 2 cores with hyperthreading, 4 without, 4 with. And sometimes more at the very top, in different forms. The first two generations of core processors had a different pattern, but those were "core [2] solo/duo/quad", they had no i and no tier numbers. (And before that was pentium 4/D.)
So we're talking about Nehalem and Westmere as the first two i* releases. Nehalem desktop had: Celeron P1053 (1 core HT), i5 750/760 (4 core no HT), i7 860-960 (4 core HT) Westmere desktop had: Pentium/Celeron G59XX/G1101 (2 core no HT), i3 530-560 (2 core HT), i5 650-680 (2 core HT), i7 970-980 (6 core HT) Links in sibling post above. So really... the HT / no HT really only lasted one release (Nehalem), and that did…
But those Celerons are simply a different product line. I'm pretty sure they never released an i processor with less than 2 cores and 4 threads.
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> there are just so many people who say they have an “i5” or “i7” without knowing what generation it is from. Since switching to laptops from building my own PCs from parts I stopped following CPU models directly. I knew i3 was "weaker" than i5, and i5 "weaker" than i7. But remember getting an "i5" 10 years and they are still selling them. Shouldn't it be up to i15 by now? It would have been better to have some suffi…
BMW is also still selling the 5 series.