I do some work on my ThinkPad t420s. It's about a decade old now. I understand it's anecdotal but fwiw. Note that it's plugged into Ethernet.

I do ALL my work on a t25 which is just about 5 years old now. This includes daily calls with dozens of video participants (ms teams and WebEx mostly) while I have chrome and Firefox open with multiple tabs including outlook and Gmail and slack, couple of MS words, couple of PowerPoints, Visio, etc. That's a dual core processor from more than couple of years ago and it's nowhere near capacity with that workload.

It does have lots of ram and Ethernet to residential Fibe 1gbps. But CPU just hasn't been an issue and I plan to work on this another 5 years

> This includes daily calls with dozens of video participants

The real question is, are you one of the video participants too? Or are you just watching others but not sending any video of your own?

With my t25? Participant, absolutely! As I said, it's my main daily workstation. Over last two years that included using built-in webcam, a dsrl, and currently Logitech external webcam.

Heck I've run full PeopleSoft multi vm setups on my ancient t420 back in the day. A little CPU really goes a longer way than people realize.

Video encode is also hardware-accelerated these days. J5005 may be Nehalem performance but unlike Nehalem it has a hardware video encoder onboard. Intel has had it for a long time, I think maybe back to Sandy or Ivy days so it’s basically in everything at this point. It’s not archival quality but it’s more than fine for videoconferencing starting from around Haswell. Goldmont actually has a fairly modern media block (newer than skylake - it has full hevc main10 decode and hdmi 2.0b support) that is backported from the Ice Lake architecture during the years Intel stalled out on 10nm.

I’m just using Nehalem and Conroe as a touchstone that people understand in terms of cpu performance. That is what you get in general cpu performance, but it’s also got better media support and crypto acceleration and so on, so it’s more usable today. Actually a closer look at the numbers puts it just below Sandy Bridge i5 actually.

AMD cpu users (non-apu) and RX 6500/6400 owners obviously need to look elsewhere however. NVIDIA’s 1030 chips are ancient pascal based crap but AMD dropping encoder support on a chip designed during the pandemic era of work-from-home is a bit tone-deaf.

(Yes, 6500 and 6400 were designed during the pandemic, the architecture took longer to develop but 6500 wasn’t the lead ship in its architecture, and taping out a new chip configuration takes much less time than designing a whole architecture from scratch… AMD definitely knew it would be used as a desktop chip too. It was a deliberate space-saving move in the face of their wafer shortages, not something they got blindsided by.)

> It’s not archival quality but it’s more than fine for videoconferencing starting from around Haswell.

My 2015 MacBook Pro with Broadwell i5 would indeed work "fine" for videoconferencing (in my case Google Meet), but it would also use most of a CPU core to do it. Which is fine if that's all you're doing. But if I wanted to share my screen and work on something else while doing so then it could quite quickly get to the point where I needed to start shutting down other programs, and even then it could cause lag when typing in less well-implemented apps.

My new MacBook with M1 Pro cpu it still uses most of a cpu core for videoconferencing, but it's a single E core and I have 9 others cores. Videoconferencing now makes zero difference to system responsiveness.

Most people won't need 8 cores, but I reckon the average office worker in 2022 would benefit from 4.

It looks like Google Meet uses VP9, which certainly is not accelerated on 2014 CPUs.