CPU gains for the last few gens have mainly been in perf/watt and, now, core count in lower-class chips thanks to AMD. The biggest benefit of a system upgrade for the last few gens, from a user perspective, has been for the chipset's gains - NVMe, USB3, USB-C, etc. more than raw performance. That's slowly trickled up but the real-world gains in many tasks haven't been enough to really justify it.

I know many people still sitting on anywhere from a 2xxx gen to a 5xxx gen and just don't feel compelled to upgrade from a CPU perspective. Those that eventually do, do so for the motherboard features more than the CPU - that's just a necessary cost for a small benefit.

This is marginally different for laptops where perf/watt becomes more important, of course. However for desktops, I certainly wouldn't be troubled by a 4xxx gen. I upgraded last year and it was from a 920 to a 6600K. Even the 920 did much of what I wanted, honestly, it was more a luxury upgrade.

> NVMe

While NVMe benchmarks are stunning I really am curious whether in an ordinary setting the difference to SATA can be felt at all. Not measured -- felt. When the era of swap ended because CPUs / chipsets finally could handle enough RAM and when we went from HDD to SDD, those could be felt for sure.

> This is marginally different for laptops

In laptop world, the problem is that with the spread of thin craze most laptops are now running 15W CPUs instead of 35W like in the old age and so there is little performance increase, no core count increase.

I switched from a 2012 15'' MacBook Pro to a 2017 15'' Macbook Pro and the difference is staggering. The older laptop had a regular SSD, while the newer one is using NVMe. Although it also has a considerably newer CPU, which likely plays a huge role in the performance difference.

I sometimes tweak stuff on both laptops at the same time, and doing a side-by-side restart or even waking up from sleep makes the older model's lesser performance painfully obvious

Additionally "thin craze" matters - I remember having an old 15" laptop in the mid/late '00s that would actually give me backache after carrying it in my backpack for a while.

Today I can't even tell if my 13" dell xps is in it or not.

Interestingly, I cannot really tell if the notebook is in the backpack, but a water bottle with about the same total weight can totally be felt. Probably the very beneficial weight distribution of a flat slab that's affixed in an upright position directly against my back, vs. a cylindric bottle that's either moving around in the backpack, or stuck to its side and therefore exerting a sideways torque on my back.

NVMe definitely feels faster.

I have an NVMe and a SATA SSD in my workstation. I do most of my work off the NVME, but occasionally work on projects that live on the SATA disk. I definitely notice a difference in things with a lot of disk access.

About the only things I've noticed is in some of my node projects so far.. for general use, not nearly so much.

Just upgraded to an NVMe for my primary drive... my mb had a x2 nvme slot, but it didn't work... luckily I got a pciex4 adapter, frankly, I know it's a bit faster than the SSD, but in general use, I haven't noticed the difference so much. Aside from node builds are a bit faster (which tends to touch a lot of random files on disk). General use hasn't been noticeable.

As you say, the thinness craze was enabled by lower-power CPUs that performed no worse than previous gens. They need smaller batteries and less extreme cooling which means smaller sizes. Alternatively, keep the same size and you can enlarge the battery. Either way, perf/watt gains have enabled that in a way that's visible to consumers. With a plugged in PC, that's not visible.

Last year I went from a Corsair Neutron 240GB to a Samsung 950 Pro.

Not much difference in daily usage under Windows 7.

Similarly, I only just upgraded from an i7 860 (2009) to a 6700K at the end of last year. In performance benchmarks, it's only twice as fast as my old one, and that's over seven years. Big difference to how things felt in the past. Imagine if your 66Mhz Pentium still ran well enough that you weren't sure it was worth upgrading to a 500Mhz Pentium III. Same time span.

This was mostly only true in the 90s tho, when we saw the hockey stick part of the S curve: between 1981 and 1987 your comparable choice would have been upgrading a 5mhz 8088 to a 10mhz 286.

a 386 machine would be ~$10k (in 80s $s!) and more like a high end multichip Xeon system or something today - they actually had a compaq 386 of that vintage in my first job and it was still in active service in 2001.

In that case I guess my problem is we bought our first computer in '95, so my kind of baseline experience is that super fast world.

Try and imagine since 1980. Kind of hard to explain to my boy actually. He has my old computer from about 7 years ago. At least i think it was 7. Intel 2600k? Still works a treat. It's almost as old as he is.

I also got Intel 2600K. Yes, it's still going very strong. No reason to switch until my motherboard breaks. Speed gains would be minimal, yet getting a new processor would be quite expensive.

I've a 2600K with 32GB DDR3 ram, and its the cost of DDR4 ram that is that stopping me from upgrading. Well that and the fact that that i've no compelling reason to upgrade beyond keeping up with the joneses.

i had an i5-2500k that my nephew got a couple years ago simply cause we moved to a different country and i didn't want to lug a big-ass desktop with me. I suspect most people wouldn't notice the difference between it and a brand new CPU.

I just replaced my work desktop i5-2500 with an i5-4570. Same SSDs, 16GB RAM instead of 24GB. (Not a voluntary move.)

There's no perceivable difference.

If you have enough RAM to avoid swapping and cheap SATA SSDs, all the requirements for fast/large CPUs or graphics cards are special applications of some sort. Browsers and editors and terminal windows and video playback don't count.

Even with a very intense overclock, Sandy Bridge is starting to fall behind the pack in gaming. Not obsolete by any means but 5 years of even incremental IPC gains do add up, and Sandy Bridge is still running PCIe 2.0. The 2500k is starting to come out 30-50% behind the 7600K in many titles let alone a 7700K, which is a very perceptible difference.

http://www.gamersnexus.net/guides/2773-intel-i5-2500k-revisi...

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2016-is-it-...

For "work" workloads, Sandy Bridge is still quite potent though. Honestly in that segment the gains have mostly been coming from moving to more cores. A hexacore or octacore with hyperthreading/SMT knocks the stuffing out of an i5.

Yep. It was that reason that i upgraded from the 2600k. My entire workspace is virtual machines. The 2600k started falling down there. Vmware without hyperthreading is kinda non optimal. Sub normal. Frfrrl. Everything else, it is still a cracking pc.

Oh it's a common (& valid) comparison :)

Just wanted to add a little historical context.

I'm still on my i7 860 with nothing compelling me to upgrade. Intel's biggest competitor in 2017 is Intel from 2010.

It really depends on your applications/field. If you are in machine learning or data analysis, AVX can give a welcome performance boost. Also, a maximum of 16GB RAM is quite limiting.

If you're in ML, can't you just stick a new GPU in the PCIe slot? A GTX 1070 can be had for below 500 €, which would still be a bit less than a new motherboard, new RAM and a new i7.

My i5-750 has run 32GB RAM for years (4x8GB). I haven't had any issues.

> I upgraded last year and it was from a 920 to a 6600K. Even the 920 did much of what I wanted, honestly, it was more a luxury upgrade.

The 920 is a solid performer, but oh my does it need efficient cooling. At launch it almost felt like a return to the Pentium 4 era in terms of power consumption.

If I were to upgrade my 920 anytime soon, it would be to reduce the need for cooling fans and to get a quieter system. As a programmer, I don't need more ultra-cores or jigga-hertz.

When I upgraded to my 4790k (from amd FX-8350) the main driver was my electric bill, I actually had a couple hotter computers running, my htpc was similar power usage... went to the newer i7 on the desktop, and a brix (similar to nuc) for htpc, recently to an nvidia shield tv in place of htpc.

Indeed, especially with Intel still trying to upsell users to the highest level X chips to get more PCI-e channels. Fortunately AMD has more than intel available from their cheapest chip to their most expensive.

I'm still running on a i5-3550k. I really don't feel compelled to upgrade because I haven't seen a performance drop in gaming yet.

Just curious, what do you do that will make a difference with more cores?

Software dev.. usually have one or more DBs and/or services containerized, vm or direct running at once. Mainly it's a matter of the number of background processes that will run as intently as the front/dev side depending on what I'm doing.

I also have multiple SSDs and an NVMe I recently put in... that seems to have made the most difference. I'm running 32GB ram now, and don't tend to bump into that as a limitation.