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by drzaiusapelord 3735 days ago
If anything its a fairly strong statement on the ruggedness of the PC platform. I have a 2500k i5 in my old desktop. With a new-ish videocard I play all the newest AAA games at high quality. Its incredible how the x86 world really hasn't had any huge performance bumps and how a Q1 2011 CPU is still competitive.

Also, there's the larger narrative of people buying tablets and putting off PC upgrades, so the PC ages. Don't worry Apple, you're still getting their money. Its just people aren't ready to replace a general purpose computer that they control and can run pretty much everything with a walled garden mobile device designed to get ad impressions and consume media.

If anything, this is Apple's frustration. They have all this success but people and businesses keep buying PCs. They'll never crack this market. They're too invested in the Jobsian "closed" ecosystem philosophy to be as agile as the PC platform. Mocking those who don't drink their kool-aid just makes them look like sore winners.

edit: I'm aware I can buy a newer chip, but from a single core vs single core perspective its not that much faster. Very little consumer software is properly multi-threaded so this is why my expensive work computer with the newest i7 doesnt feel any faster than my 5 year old desktop at home. Most things are pegged to one core and at the end of the day single core performance is what's going to matter.

1 comments

> I have a 2500k i5 in my old desktop.

> Its incredible how the x86 world really hasn't had any huge performance bumps and how a Q1 2011 CPU is still competitive.

Actually you can have twice as fast desktop CPU today than your 2500k, and not for some number crunching you'll maybe never need (even though it's the most important thing for others) but for such common tasks like compiling the code:

http://techreport.com/r.x/skylake/legacy1-qtbench.gif

Not bad at all for the times when the hardware speedups are getting harder.

But it's good that even the newest games don't expect only the latest CPU.

Where is the doubled single core performance? We have more cores now, but they are almost as fast as 3-4 years ago.
> Actually you can have twice as fast desktop CPU today than your 2500k

Alternatively, you can overclock the 2500K to absurd levels (33% or more seems the norm, even on air cooling), which negates most of the advantage of newer models.