Quote:
Originally Posted by TweakHead
There are some new instructions added. Plus, it's not just the processor but the kind of chip they're using on mother boards now. A lot has changed, for the better.
Also, one has to realize that, for instance, some of these new instructions can make a huge difference - more so then you'd get from simple tests - if developers decide to code them in to their products, making them a huge advantage.
Modern CPUs have things like hyper threading and turbo boost, are mounted on much more efficient chips. First generation i7 compared to recent ones? You're in for a huge surprise... It's really come a long way m8!
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HT and turbo have been around a while though. I bought a 4770k based system about a year ago and actually returned it because real-world performance was not that much better than the i7-965 in my primary system (the 965 came out five years ago). The 870 I mentioned that I'm using for my audio host is overclocked and is slightly slower than the 965.
Even if the new ones do have new instructions (I'm not aware of specifics around that), applications would have to be compiled to take advantage of them, making them backward incompatible with old processors (and of course they aren't). The biggest hurdle for audio is that most audio-related algorithms, except for perhaps LAME encoding and so forth, do not lend themselves well to multi-threading. So while the multi-threaded performance of some of these newer six-core processors is indeed impressive in synthetic benchmarks or in situations that strongly take advantage of multi-threading, it's hard to justify an upgrade at that point.
These numbers compare a 4770K to a 975 which performs about the same as my 965.
http://www.tomshardware.com/charts/c...d%5B5750%5D=on
You'll notice the truly impressive performance gains are in things like the encryption score (a usage that can utilize multiple threads nicely), you can ignore the ridiculous numbers like the PCMark 7 number (drill down into the chart and you'll see what I mean, that's a website error), etc. Something like the Photoshop score shows a significant benefit, but that's because image processing is a very parallelizable type of operation. If you start looking at everything else you start to wonder "really? a 10-20% difference represents five years of CPU progress"?
There are good reasons CPU technology has brick walled (or at least slowed greatly in terms of year over year real world performance benefits) that aren't anyone's fault, but also Intel has been focusing on adding video performance and reducing reliance on Nvidia and AMD for that which I don't think is a good use of their time and R&D resources, personally.
All of this said, I don't want anyone to think I'm doubting that the newer ones are better. But since overall synthetic benchmark results tend to show about a 40-50% increase over the last 5 years, and real world results tend to show much less than that, I'm inclined to believe that a plug-in that's getting 2x-3x gains from newer processors has something else going on in terms of multi-threading technique that I'd be curious to know more about.