For years CPUs had numbers that went up: 286, 386, 486, Pentium.
After that, it was Mhz and Ghz that people used to rate a CPU.
But none of those things are as relevant as they used to be.
So what number goes up? i3, i5, i7, i9. That's what Intel is telling us. That's the number they want us to see.
How would you differentiate?
> MacBook Pro (Retina, 15-inch, Mid 2015)
> Processor 2.8 GHz Quad-Core Intel Core i7
prettly clear there
Honestly - it's not even the i3, i5, i7, i9 thing. It's the fact that two i5s, etc; can be ludicrously different in terms of performance from one another because of the sub-generations within the named generations.
Yes - it's ridiculous that I could buy an i7 ten years ago, buy an i7 today, and yet - of course - they are absolutely nothing close to each other in terms of performance.
IIRC the Pentium line did not make this mistake. (Though the Celeron line could be very confusing, if I recall correctly.)
In fact, lots of things are like this.
In CPU land, the architecture codename or process node might be part of such a "minimal tuple" but these are frequently omitted by OEMs and retailers in their advertising materials.
Let’s go to a full quarter mile, which show a bigger difference, but again not a huge one.
2009: 11.2 seconds/130.5 mph
2019: 10.6-seconds/134 mph
This would be a better comparison of Ford Mustang GT’s of the same year. Massive improvement.
Time to stop from 60 mph?
Effective turning radius at 60 mph?
Interior noise in decibels at 60 mph?
Maximum shock absorption at 60 mph?
Or 0-100-0.
7:06 vs 7:24 for the old car. Although in 'segmented' times it had went something like 6:54
About 10 years ago. 7:19.63 (ZR1 / i9)
https://www.automobilemag.com/news/2020-chevrolet-corvette-s...
About a year ago 7:29.90 (base model / i3)
Better measure than top speed anyway
This take is deceitful. Acer typically uses a very simple scheme to define their products, which goes something like "Acer <product line> <model>".
The scheme "XR382CQK bmijqphuzx" is more a kin to a product ID, which goes way beyond make and model and specifies exactly which hardware combination is shipped in a particular product.
Complaining that Acer names its products like "XR382CQK bmijqphuzx" makes as much sense as complaining that Apple names its laptops like MVFM2xx/A, which Apple uses for the same effect.
https://www.amazon.com/Acer-XR382CQK-bmijqphuzx-UltraWide-Fr...
Current Pentium and Celeron chips can either be mobile variants of the Core line or... Atoms.
I have a Celeron N4100 in my cheap netbook. It's listed as "Gemini Lake" in Intel ARK, which is a rebranding of its original lineage... Goldmont. (Goldmont Plus)
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Celeron_micropro...
If you were to look at other Gemini Lake cores... You'll see that "Pentium Silver" also falls into that group.
https://ark.intel.com/content/www/us/en/ark/products/codenam...
TLDR: Intel has made it nearly impossible for anyone to know if they're getting Core based or Atom based mobile chips unless significant research is done beforehand.
This is not to say avoid Atoms at all costs. The N4100 I have is reasonably on par with the Core 2 Q6600 quad, which was quite the beast of a chip back in its day.
The current Atoms are nothing like the in-order-execution only monstrosities they originally launched as... but I still find Intel's branding a bit more than confusing. If incredibly deceitful.
Instead, you have designations like "Intel Core i7 8565U Whiskey Lake" or "Intel Core i7 10510U Comet Lake". The first one is 8th generation (=8xxx), the second one is 10th generation (10xxx, but the 14nm one, not the 10nm "Ice Lake"), and most OEMs do put these into their marketing materials and they are on their respective web shops (these two specifically were copied from two different Thinkpads X1 Carbon models).
The "pro" version might be an i8, while the budget version is i3. In a few years time, the pro version will be up to i12 while the budget version is now i8.
You have model numbers for when someone needs to look up some super specific detail.
And it's cycle- and power-efficiency figures are?
Only the frequency wars ended, the marketing and features wars continue the prohibition on computer architecture enlightenment unabated.
OSes, platform toolchains, and apps need to prioritize UX (UI response time and time-to-first-window) to lessen the perception and the reality of waiting on apps doing unimportant activities rather than appearing and beginning interaction.
My wife had a “my computer is slow” issue the other day. Fans blowing like crazy, extremely hot, battery draining fast. Turns out, lsof was stuck on some corrupt preferences file. Killed the process and file and all was fine. Regular people lack the tools to diagnose the problem and just deal with it, restart or buy a new one. We really should make diagnosing easier.
No, seriously. Once the root cause is found, humanize the description of the problem and ask the user what they want to do about it.
I bet they would to reduce labor costs.
Desktop Reliability Engineering ;-)
https://web.archive.org/web/20110703091817/http://buyafuckin...
The memory hierarchy of a modern CPU with spinning rust might as well be the Parker Solar Probe waiting on a sea anemone.
I am remiss how someone these days can buy a laptop with spinning rust and 4 GiB and then complain it's "slow." Maybe they should've bought a real laptop for real work that's repairable and upgradable?
Unfortunately, the best ones aren't anymore.
I bought a T480 with dual batteries that does run for 10 hours. It has a 2 TiB SSD and 32 GiB. Works fine for me. Water-resistant, repairable, awesome keyboard, and MIL-SPEC drop rated too. Optional magnesium display top assembly cover.
It is worth noting that if you think GPU model numbers are fine, CPUs are actually very similar. There's the 2600k, 3770k, etc. (sandy bridge and ivy bridge CPUs respectively) The first number goes up each generation and the rest is how powerful it is within the generation. Similar to Nvidia having a GTX 980 and later a GTX 1080.
I don't get why not a single brand other than Apple gets product names remotely right. Every time a relative asks me for a laptop recommendation and shows me a list of models I have absolutely no clue what to tell them. All the model numbers look like they came from a password generator and the only discernible difference without hours of looking at spec sheets is the price.
(I know it’s a different product category. It’s relevant because it’s name and number is perfect)
I’ve lost track of how many times I’ve heard people wonder why their 10-year old computer is slow. “But I have an i7”