On Fri, May 17, 2019 at 06:23:33PM -0400, Giles Orr via talk wrote:
Lennart: One problem with claiming "my 6 year old X has higher specs" is that it doesn't account for the generational differences in the Intel chips. Our desktops got "upgraded" at work, but I was thoroughly unimpressed because we went from an i5 to an i5, and from 8G to 8G ... but we also went from 3rd to 8th generation. A clunky Python script I run weekly to process web statistics went from 20 minutes to 2 minutes. (Part of this could be throughput on the motherboard, or from the change from spinning disk to SSD, but I think it's mostly processor.) An order of magnitude is nothing to scoff at.
Most of that is almost certainly the SSD. It makes a huge difference to anything that does IO. I did add an SSD to my 6 year old laptop and wow did that make a difference. Did the clock rate change a lot between those two i5 machines? Also a few i5 models in the past were only dual core rather than quad core. Most (if not all) 8th gen are 6 core. A quick check of some cpu speed benchmarks between 3rd and 8th gen shows that at the same clock speed they have gained about 30% performance. Not bad, but also not that impressive for 5 years work. Intel's i series have not had any huge jumps in performance in quite a few years, except for code taking advantage of new aes and sse 4.2 instructions, although my 3rd gen i7 in the laptop has aes too, so it is just missing sse 4.2, and runs the same base clock speed as the one in the NUC. The laptop also has much faster graphics than the NUC's intel graphics.
Evan: From a security point of view (Rowhammer, Fallout, RIDL, ZombieLoad ...) I would encourage you to consider an AMD processor. (Or better yet, ARM - but that's not really viable on the desktop yet.) AMD isn't totally immune to the plethora of recent attacks, but it's a lot better off. (I say this, but I'm writing you from an 8th gen i7 bought in the middle of that series of appalling revelations.)
AMD is certainly looking very interesting these days (after years of not being that interesting). -- Len Sorensen