Question GREATEST CPU OF ALL TIME (DESKTOP >1999)

DAPUNISHER · Sep 22, 2024

BTRY B 529th FA BN said:
No love for 1366 socket? X58 was a beast. Had multiple CPU drop ins

All the way through X99 deserves honorable mention IMO. It is a fairly active scene, what with all of the OEM workstations being dirt cheap on Ebay and such. And AliExpress being chock-a-block with custom re-manufactured boards, and the CPUs costing next to nothing there.

GodisanAtheist said:
GodisanAtheist said:

Given the difference in competitive landscape each arch had to face, I think Zen 3 edges out the win here.

Click to expand...

That's an excellent point; It faced the most competitive landscape since the 2000s. When discussing the GOAT fighters, who they fought weighs heavily in the discussions. Big difference between crushing cans and beating other greats.

SiliconFly · Sep 22, 2024

Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge naturally. Sandy was awesome, but it was Ivy that made a huge difference. Had an Sony Ivy Laptop for almost 4 years. Amazing piece of hardware and the longest I've held on to just one machine. It was that good. Missed it for quite a while after I gave it away.

Just for the sense of completion, need to mention this too, the granddaddy of x86. The original 8086. It was revolutionary during its time.

And not to forget the venerable 80386 with the first "true" protected mode! Simply the G.O.A.T! Remember crashing it a zillion times trying to write protected-mode assembly code.

fastandfurious6 · Sep 22, 2024

LGA1366 NEHALEM was also strong contender

i7 920 held from Q4 2008 for so many years!

fastandfurious6 · Sep 22, 2024

SiliconFly said:
Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge naturally. Sandy was awesome, but it was Ivy that made a huge difference. Had an Sony Ivy Laptop for almost 4 years. Amazing piece of hardware and the longest I've held on to just one machine. It was that good. Missed it for quite a while after I gave it away.

Just for the sense of completion, need to mention this too, the granddaddy of x86. The original 8086. It was revolutionary during its time.

And not to forget the venerable 80386 with the first "true" protected mode! Simply the G.O.A.T! Remember crashing it a zillion times trying to write protected-mode assembly code.

laptop ivy bridge quads like i7-3720QM were THE BEST laptop CPUs for almost a decade until Zen 2 4800H

I remember trying i7-8650U, 5 whole generations after ivy and being abysmally slower than an ivy quad tiny 14'' thinkpad

no joke

SiliconFly · Sep 22, 2024

fastandfurious6 said:
laptop ivy bridge quads like i7-3720QM were THE BEST laptop CPUs for almost a decade until Zen 2 4800H

I remember trying i7-8650U, 5 whole generations after ivy and being abysmally slower than an ivy quad tiny 14'' thinkpad

no joke

After Ivy, they did have some good products. But none of them had the greatness. After more than a decade, Lunar Lake is the one that can stand up to it.

DAPUNISHER · Sep 22, 2024

SiliconFly said:
Sandy Bridge/Ivy Bridge naturally. Sandy was awesome, but it was Ivy that made a huge difference.

GOTE (greatest of the era) but not GOAT IMO. After all, they were can crushers; FX being the tomato can fighter.

DZero · Sep 22, 2024

Core i5 2500K it would fight even the Core i7 Haswell era, it was so broken that Intel never made one again.

fastandfurious6 · Sep 22, 2024

NTMBK said:
Bulldozer, for the sheer amount of memes and forum arguments it started

entirely missed AMD bulldozer era, just read the opinions of how terrible they are and never bothered

2012-2017 there was only 1 high end product up until Zen 1??? Vishera?

Legacy CPU Benchmarks - Compare Products on AnandTech

Legacy CPU benchmarks: Compare two products side-by-side or see a cascading list of product ratings along with our annotations.

www.anandtech.com

They just stopped bothering with high end for 5+ years and kept making some weird dual core athlons?? 😂😂

SiliconFly · Sep 22, 2024

fastandfurious6 said:
entirely missed AMD bulldozer era, just read the opinions of how terrible they are and never bothered

2012-2017 there was only 1 high end product up until Zen 1??? Vishera?

Legacy CPU Benchmarks - Compare Products on AnandTech

Legacy CPU benchmarks: Compare two products side-by-side or see a cascading list of product ratings along with our annotations.

www.anandtech.com

They just stopped bothering with high end for 5+ years and kept making some weird dual core athlons?? 😂😂

And Intel had Kaby Lake that was even worse than Bulldozer. HT was disabled in mobile SoC due to some security concerns. I ended up losing money cos I had to sell it after a few weeks cos the performance was so dismal (it was a top of the line HP Omen). My worst buy ever!

DAPUNISHER · Sep 22, 2024

fastandfurious6 said:
entirely missed AMD bulldozer era, just read the opinions of how terrible they are and never bothered

2012-2017 there was only 1 high end product up until Zen 1??? Vishera?

Legacy CPU Benchmarks - Compare Products on AnandTech

Legacy CPU benchmarks: Compare two products side-by-side or see a cascading list of product ratings along with our annotations.

www.anandtech.com

They just stopped bothering with high end for 5+ years and kept making some weird dual core athlons?? 😂😂

If it wasn't for the semi-custom division they created to work with MS and Sony on the consoles, I think AMD = RIP. Intel had almost an entire decade of fighting tomato cans from AMD. It's why those generations can never be GOAT in my rankings. You can't be the best unless you beat the best. Intel was fighting the best of the worst. 💩

DigDog · Sep 22, 2024

the light at the end of a very, very ling tunnel .. Conroe.

..i could swear we already had this same exact thread before.

linkgoron · Sep 22, 2024

DigDog said:
the light at the end of a very, very ling tunnel .. Conroe.

I agree. I still remember when Intel released prerelease benchmark numbers because they were so good and people here were in denial claiming Intel were making them up or fudging the numbers.

fastandfurious6 · Sep 22, 2024

yes, Conroe was the First True CPU that could run an actual modern OS without stuttering

the baseline CPU

fastandfurious6 · Sep 22, 2024

love how Pentium 4 has 0 votes 😂😂😂 even bulldozer has 1

PingSpike · Sep 22, 2024

While sandy/ivy lasted a long time, I tend to agree that given the landscape this isn't as impressive as it looks. AMD was basically casting resurrection spells on itself this entire era and functionally did not exist as a competitor. And Intel started it's long decline at the same time, ensuring it didn't release anything wildly different or even increase core count until after AMD came back.

I actually think strategically the Athlon64 might be the greatest. Intel was busy trying to force high end and servers to use Itanium if they wanted 64-bit, the kind of strategy Intel never stopped using even when it killed their own decent product ideas. Most of the other CPU architecture players had exited the market around this time. Intel was eager to relegate x86 to an also-ran or budget architecture and create a true monopoly replacement, whether it was any good or not apparently wasn't as big of a consideration.

AMDs Athlon64 had the on die memory controller which gave it great performance so even if you didn't care about 64-bit it was a nice buy. Which was good because the 64bit feature was basically irrelevant during this CPUs lifetime for consumers despite what everyone said, but it cemented x86 as the server platform and forced Intel to return to x86 putting Itanium out of it's misery and ours.

GodisanAtheist · Sep 22, 2024

DAPUNISHER said:
GOTE (greatest of the era) but not GOAT IMO. After all, they were can crushers; FX being the tomato can fighter.

-In Sandy's defense I have bled on plenty of Campbell's soup can lids...

FX might have been more of a store brand plastic water bottle given it struggled to even beat the Phenom 6 core processors in certain tasks...

DigDog · Sep 22, 2024

Sandy & Ivy were clearly superior to Conroe in pretty much every single way. But, the difference between Conroe and Sandy just pales in comparison to the difference between Conroe and Netburst. Not only, but Netburst went on for YEARS and it was just years on years of misery, where we were gouged for absolutely meaningless clock frequency increases that had no relevance to the actual functionality of the platform.

Also, while this is .. obviously *wrong*, you need to think that this was the same year that the Nvidia 8800 released their first unified-shader architecture. Yes, this has nothing to do with the CPU, but from a consumer perspective, the jump in computing power was immense. You went from having to CrossFire a couple of XT1900s to play Oblivion, to just popping in a 8800GTS and a $300 CPU. And LGA775 was excellent in every way - overclocking, RAM timings, voltage control - compared to its predecessors.
XP SP2 (32 bit) was the OS of choice, with the memory extension fix for large HDDs that went over the 32-bit limit in size. What a wild world.

DrMrLordX · Sep 22, 2024

SiliconFly said:
And Intel had Kaby Lake that was even worse than Bulldozer.

KabyLake was just a refresh/rehash of Skylake. 7700k was not a bad CPU. Just not very innovative or ambitious. It was the first rehash of Skylake due to 14nm delays.

SiliconFly · Sep 22, 2024

DrMrLordX said:
KabyLake was just a refresh/rehash of Skylake. 7700k was not a bad CPU. Just not very innovative or ambitious. It was the first rehash of Skylake due to 14nm delays.

I don't know abt the full kaby lake lineup, but the mobile chips didn't have HT. And the perf was abysmal.

PingSpike · Sep 22, 2024

Kabylake wasn't really bad compared to what came before, but it was an absolute insult. 5 generations with no increase in core count even on the top sku, more if you count nehelam and the core 2 quad era. Even Intel's ardent fans started to ask, how long are they going to milk this? As if to hammer the insult home, Intel released the absolutely disgusting 7350K, generations after the last quad-core naysayers had fallen silent. Not content with selling warmed up left overs again they seem to almost threaten to take things backwards!

The 7700K was one of the worst buys from Intel because it was joke king for only a truncated period. A weak "generational" improvement over skylake and then when Zen showed up Intel was forced to rapidly release a kabylake 6 core to not look totally pathetic, and as an extra injury they wouldn't even let you upgrade to it with the kabylake motherboard you just bought.

SiliconFly · Sep 22, 2024

PingSpike said:
Kabylake wasn't really bad compared to what came before, but it was an absolute insult. 5 generations with no increase in core count even on the top sku, more if you count nehelam and the core 2 quad era. Even Intel's ardent fans started to ask, how long are they going to milk this? As if to hammer the insult home, Intel released the absolutely disgusting 7350K, generations after the last quad-core naysayers had fallen silent. Not content with selling warmed up left overs again they seem to almost threaten to take things backwards!

The 7700K was one of the worst buys from Intel because it was joke king for only a truncated period. A weak "generational" improvement over skylake and then when Zen showed up Intel was forced to rapidly release a kaby lake 6 core to not look totally pathetic, and as an extra injury they wouldn't even let you upgrade to it with the kaby lake motherboard you just bought.

Actually, when Zen came out, Intel had coffee lake. And imho, coffee lake was a much much better product than kaby lake. My mid-range acer coffee lake laptop was far superior when compared to my previous top-of-the-line HP Omen kaby lake laptop (which was pure c%@p). Worst decision I ever made.

Coffee Lake was pretty good for it's time. Then it all went down hill non-stop... until Alder Lake.

FlameTail · Sep 22, 2024

Ah, this thread's only for desktop CPUs. Concerning laptop CPUs, I would say the greatest and most legendary one is the...

Apple M1

DrMrLordX · Sep 22, 2024

PingSpike said:
kabylake 6 core

Kabylake never had a hexcore CPU:

Products formerly Kaby Lake

Products formerly Kaby Lake product listing with links to detailed product features and specifications.

ark.intel.com

The 8600k was Coffee Lake.

Otherwise I overall agree, though the 7700k was technically better than the 6700k, and probably wouldn't be remembered as being a bad CPU were it not for Zen1.

linkgoron · Sep 22, 2024

DrMrLordX said:
Otherwise I overall agree, though the 7700k was technically better than the 6700k, and probably wouldn't be remembered as being a bad CPU were it not for Zen1.

Kaby Lake was the first big sign of Intel's complete stagnation and process failures finally reaching its products. Basically re-releasing a minor improvement over SkyLake. Not even more cores or anything. IIRC some posters commented that "who cares that Intel released just minor improvement with clockspeed, it doesn't matter how performance is gained" - but it was a clear sign that Intel was in trouble and without a backup plan. It's still insane (to me) that Intel released FIVE generations of Sky Lake.

PingSpike · Sep 22, 2024

SiliconFly said:
Actually, when Zen came out, Intel had coffee lake. And imho, coffee lake was a much much better product than kaby lake. My mid-range acer coffee lake laptop was far superior when compared to my previous top-of-the-line HP Omen kaby lake laptop (which was pure c%@p). Worst decision I ever made.

Coffee Lake was pretty good for it's time. Then it all went down hill non-stop... until Alder Lake.

Coffeelake came out 8 months after zen 1, and it wouldn't even existed if zen's presence hadn't forced their hand. And the quick turn around proved how easy it would have been to have just given us some more cores. I agree coffeelake was pretty good, since the prices were much better than kabylake in response to zen and they actually offered some products that had things the previous generation lacked: more cores.

Question GREATEST CPU OF ALL TIME (DESKTOP >1999)

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