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by Delemono 1288 days ago
Modern vcpu is much faster than a 2008 CPU.

There is a significant IPC increase with every generation.

3 comments

I'd put money on an i7 960 from '08 beating a 2 vCPU GitHub Actions instance in raw compute.

My single threaded code runs about half as fast in Actions compared to my 3900x. They're not fast instances.

Your 3900x is from 2019. Op compared a CPU from 2008!
Single threaded performance just hasn't shifted that quickly in the interim.

In order for the quad core, eight thread 960 to be slower than an Actions instance, there'd need to have been an 8x uplift in single core performance since '08. It's been more like 2x.

https://mlech26l.github.io/pages/2020/12/17/cpus.html

Yes, but the 2008 CPU was 4 cores (and 8 GB of ram). Also, that is 4 real cores, compared to two logical cores. Probably still slower, but with much faster network.

~Comparable. Or maybe I got it wrong, both are still dog slow compared to anything people actually use though.

do you have a source for that? Last time I looked, the cloud CPUs were intel based versions that were optimized for energy usage, with a lower clock-speed and lower single thread performance than older (at that time 2012ish) CPUs