A project of mine is a hardware recommender, it also includes a meta-benchmark. I collect published benchmarks and build a globally sorted order of processors out of it. https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/games/cpu for games, https://www.pc-kombo.com/benchmark/apps/cpu for application workloads (that one still misses a bit of work, the gaming benchmark is better). Legacy processors are greyed out, so this might be a good starting point for you. There is also a benchmark for gpus.
For most people this processor choice is also very easy, it is "Get a Ryzen 5 2600 or an Intel Core i5-8400."
Feel free to ask if you want some custom recommendations, email is in profile :)
Also, the existing bar graph is unclear to me. What does 10/10 mean?
Example, fictional values: The 8700K is the fastest, because it was most often seen as the benchmark leader. It gets a 10. The 8600K has almost the same FPS, but it was always a bit slower, it gets a 9.9. The i5-8500 comes next, but its average FPS scaled to the 0-10 scale is lower, it gets a 8.7. Then the i5-8400, always seen as slower than the 8500 in benchmarks, would at most be able to get a 8.6, no matter what the average FPS says (with enough benchmarks average FPS become an almost meaningless metric, it's the position in the benchmark that counts).
That's why it is not possible to calculate price/performance with this. I could only highlight good deals, processors that have a high position despite being cheaper than the processors below. Which is of course already baked into the logic of the recommender.
They way I see it, I could look at AMD's Core count, Threads and Frequency, As they are clearly labelled, and that is it. On Intel's side you have features turned on and off for different i3/5/7/9, AVX speed difference etc I don't even want to bother looking it up.
Seriously, Intel has always been way too confusing with their processor lineup. AMD has always been straightforward: leave in the kitchen sink on nearly every CPU and performance scales with price. Not linearly of course, but it's much simpler to choose an AMD CPU.
We're not talking minor performance differences in features, we're talking features randomly added and removed for no logical reason from the same generation & tier of CPU model.
"Gamers need these features, but gamers often also setup servers. Let's remove server features from gaming CPUs so they can't reuse them when they upgrade, and so they have to buy new server CPUs!"
Basically, if you don't want the headache you just buy one of the highest end/most expensive CPUs on offer and you're probably fine. With AMD the feature set is pretty consistent, so you have considerably more choice to find a good price point.
In comparison, AMD's offerings are surprisingly easy. There's a handful of SKUs differentiated on core count and frequency. Generally they all have the same PCIe lanes, RAM access, SMT, instruction sets, and so on.
Ryzen 1 - slow, medium, fast, elite
Ryzen 2 - slow, medium, fast, elite
pick the one you need based on pricing/discounts if any. It's not that hard really.
For gen 2, that'd be:
23xx, 25xx, 27xx, ThreadRipper.
I think they picked the names/numbers to show some kind of equivalence with i3/5/7, but that's not quite it.
ThreadRipper is interesting. It requires a different socket than the other desktop processors and is targeted more at workstation class machines.
In servers there are Epyc and Epyc 2.
Threadripper is their workstation CPU.
slow (3), medium (5), fast (7), elite (Threadripper)
If you don't want to spend more than USD$800 on the CPU alone, don't look at the elite/threadripper line.
What is your budget? That is the first question you need to answer instead of trying to understand the entire line of chips, look at how much you have to spend, and then find the fastest one within the budget.
It's useless to try to think about the entire line of CPU's when you will only buy 1 chip (unless you are representing Dell and need to buy thousands of chips)
> If you love Intel still after all, you should still buy AMD, teach them a painful lesson to wake them up.
But how do I choose which AMD CPU I need ? Back in my youth p4 and athlon were easy to compare (freq., IPS and a modifier because AMD) but now I can't even tell the differences between any i5/3/7 and when I look at AMD names it's as confusing but with a different lingo. I feel the same regarding GPU so maybe I am too old for that now.