Stefan Monnier wrote: > > The most recent general-purpose Intel CPU without VT-X is from 2012. > [...] > > *everything* on processors that old is slow. > > Actually, for many (most?) single-threaded applications, I wouldn't be > surprised if some 2010 CPUs end up within a factor 3 of the most badass > desktop you can find today.
In 2010, Intel released the i7-930. The i7-975 was released in June of 2009. In March of 2010, the flagship for speed was the Xeon X7542, but that's a server CPU. In 2010, AMD was not competitive with Intel per-core, so we can ignore them. PassMark's single thread benchmark is currently won by the Intel i9-13900ks - score 4796. The i7-930 gets a 1271 The i7-975 gets a 1489 The Xeon X5698 -- not releases until 2011, but I can't find a benchmark for the X7542 -- gets a 1922. It's also a server CPU, not a desktop. 4796 / 1489 = 3.22 I will admit that this is a synthetic benchmark. It is not my synthetic benchmark, and a mistake I made earlier led me to write up an admission that you were right -- until I realized that I had been looking at the multicore benchmarks of all the older CPUs, not the single thread. 3.22 is pretty close to 3x, though. It seems likely that if you had a single-threaded task that didn't rely on RAM bandwidth or disk latency or bandwidth, you would actually see just a 3x difference by 2 years later in fairly mainstream CPUs - an i5-2550, for example. -dsr-
