Last CPU upgrade that you noticed?

[tashirosgt]

What was the last CPU upgrade that you really noticed? (-"upgrade" to include getting a new computer.) I recall how nice a 586 was compared to a 286. The step up to an Athlon was impressive. After that, the improvements weren't so dramatic. I'm configuring some Phenom 4 core machines and they don't seem any faster than my AMD 3 core machines. (It's an FC 16 vs FC 12 comparison also.)

Maybe there's a corollary to Moore's law. Transistor density will double every two years, but you'll notice it half as much.

Of course, I don't do computer gaming or anything computationally intensive. Perhaps people that do still notice dramatic improvements with a new CPU or machine.

[Dan]

Agreed. For general computing needs, the War Department's 3 core AMD and this Phenom II x4 is negligible ... until I start to dig into CPU intensive chores like GIMP work on large images. Then that fourth core makes itself both known and appreciated.

My AMD x6 is a least 4-5 times faster than my old AMD x2 when compiling code or transcoding

[Adunaic]

Single to multicore (well actually multicore to single core when I had to use another laptop).

The only other one I have noticed is when my laptop suffered a fault and would only run at 800MHz instead of 2.2 GHz (8 cores makes no difference then, - its still slow)

[Evil_Bert]

I certainly noticed my last upgrade from an Athlon 64 2800+ (2.2GHz) to a Phenom II x4 945 (3.0 > 3.6 GHz).

The old Athlon struggled to run VirtualBox at all, but I can happily run 3 VMs simultaneously on the new one. And it's dramatically faster at everything else, except maybe basic wordprocessing.

[RupertPupkin]

Originally Posted by Evil_Bert

I certainly noticed my last upgrade from an Athlon 64 2800+ (2.2GHz)

You sure about that 2.2GHz? I don't see any Athlon 64 2800+ rated above 1.8GHz: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...icroprocessors.

The biggest upgrade difference I noticed was in going from an AMD Am5x86-P75 133MHz to an AMD K6-III+ 500MHz. That was about 12 years ago.

[SwampKracker]

Athlon 650 -> Athlon XP3200+

[weitjong]

Originally Posted by Evil_Bert

I certainly noticed my last upgrade from an Athlon 64 2800+ (2.2GHz) to a Phenom II x4 945 (3.0 > 3.6 GHz).

The old Athlon struggled to run VirtualBox at all, but I can happily run 3 VMs simultaneously on the new one. And it's dramatically faster at everything else, except maybe basic wordprocessing.

Ditto here, although for my case it was an AMD Athlon 64 X2 Dual Core (Toledo) Processor 4400+ (2200 MHz) to an Intel Core i7 2600K (Sandy Bridge) Processor 3400 MHz. The latter is a quad core (with Intel Hyperthreading), so Fedora "sees" it as having 8 "CPUs" as it has 8 "Hyperthreads". I can also run 3 to 4 VMs simultaneously in the latter with qemu-kvm. In the past the former processor only barely able me to run 1 VM using qemu with kqemu accellarator. My Toledo does not have the "svm" flag yet.

Another noticable areas are the compiling time and transcoding time. I used to leave my machine unattended for these two tasks. With the new processor, a tea-break will do. I also remember there was a time how I had to leave my AMD K5 (the one before my Athlon) over night to compile the Linux kernel .

[Evil_Bert]

Originally Posted by RupertPupkin

You sure about that 2.2GHz? I don't see any Athlon 64 2800+ rated above 1.8GHz

Yeah, my HTPC had an Althon 64 3500+ at 2.2GHz, which was what I was remembering. The 2800+ ran at 1.8GHz.

Thanks for pointing that out. We can all sleep better now. The world is safe again.

[BBQdave]

Went from Dell Inspiron 1100 (2.0GHz celeron - 1 gb of ram) with Debian 6 to Toshiba Satellite C655 (i3 - 4 gb of ram) with Fedora 16. Big difference in speed and responsive DE

[stevea]

I had some P4 systems (~2.8Ghz hyperthreaded, but the clock overstated the real performance) and upgraded to an E6700 (dual core @ 3.2Ghz) seveal years ago which was a big performance improvement.

The current workhorse (i5 o'clocked to 4Ghz) is a notch better cpu performance - nothing magical, but it's a vast power savings. System operates <52watts until stressed). The e6700 system uses over 100W at idle. Yes - I really notice the lower power and near-silent fans and lack of heat in summer.

[droidhacker]

I think the biggest problem is that software complexity increases no slower than hardware.

Which basically means that when your hardware gets twice as fast, your software will be 3 times as big and therefore take 3 times as fast of a computer to run equally fast as the old software.

The problem is also self perpetuating. When the hardware gets faster, the software developers can make bigger slower software.... so they do. Either through more complex software, or through laziness. I've found that there is now FAR less inclination to optimize software as there used to be back when hardware was simpler, I also can't think of anything you can actually do on modern hardware that you couldn't do equally fast on an 80386.

[Skara Brae]

I built my own Core-i5 2500K based gaming computer last year. An impressive CPU.

I have the impression that MS Vista Home Premium is not the best OS for that hardware (Yeah, I know, silly joke. But for the record: I expect this to be my very last machine with MS Windows.)

[Hammerhead V]

Intel Pentium 4 2.8 Ghz to an Intel Pentium 4 3.4 Ghz (with hyper-threading).
Most of my other upgrades have felt fairly incremental (apart from a jump we made when I was a kid from a ~300 Mhz to an ~800 Mhz processor).

[kona0197]

I'm using a Pentium 4 2.9 GHz CPU at the moment. I can really see the difference between this CPU and something that has dual core or better.