Ryzen 7401p still represents the pinnacle-for-it's-time value offering to me. 24 cores, single socket, on a 14nm process, launched July 2017 for $1075. Just an amazing breakthrough processor. At the time there were supposed to be X300 and A300 chipsets coming, basically just boot bios, to make ultra-low cost motherboards possible. There have been improvements since then to architecture & IPC, but overall it feels like we've been headed in reverse since then in terms of chips that get put into medium/large-ish sized chassis.
It has been remarkable what a mockery Mac has made of mobile chips, and now of desktop chips. At a way more reasonable price point.
> but the company’s decision to eschew clock speed disclosures suggests that these CPUs differ only modestly.
I forget exactly when but the first Google IO that happened where Google started offering simply "Intel Core i5" or i7, without saying the model number (2017?), without revealing speeds, & it was a huge huge jumping the shark moment for me. A post competitive market, where speeds were good enough, where reputation & market presence domineered over metrics & comparable factors. I don't think chasing specific GHz & cache size numbers &c is super rewarding or important, but it felt like the first time we were being sold an unspecific system, where obvious inquiry into what we were buying was blocked.
This is somewhat the opposite of this article: that Apple has found a good enough CPU to sell everywhere. But I still think the real truth is that the providers, those building systems, have begun to refuse to compete. They refuse to detail what they are offering. AMD has been without competition and the new 24c chip is considerably more expensive, albeit for yes more IPC, but it still hurts me a little. Looking at Google no longer allowing us to have any idea what kind of Core i5 or whatever chip though, they beat this article to the punch almost half a decade ago. Consumers haven't been given respect, haven't been allowed to know what wattage, what caches, what Hz their chips use for a long time now. Google started that, Google pushed the post-knowable computing upon us. Apple is merely following up on this, merely delivering what Google started, at a far better price point, with far better underlying technology.