(06-24-2014, 11:05 AM)Coatleque Wrote: The i3/i5/i7 processor family is one large marketing ploy by Intel to generate sales. All three processors use the exact same die. The difference is that Intel intentionally damages their own product to fit specific price points. The i3 has areas of the chip that are intentionally burned out so they do not work. The i5 is fully capable of hyper-threading, if Intel hadn't burned out the connecting channels. Etc, etc, etc. The best processor you can buy is the i5 series UNLESS you are doing intense graphics editing (Photoshop, etc). There are no other applications out there that make use of the hyper-threading of the i7, and video games are mostly 32-bit which means they only run on one core to begin with.
Well... it's rather more complicated with the chips, actually.
Creating chips is a technically demanding process that often goes wrong in various and interesting ways, so every chip is made to be the Most Awesome Chip Intel sells. However, some fail that test, and so they get binned down until they pass the tests for the appropriate type of chip. That's one way you get i5s and i3s, and is the primary way that nVidia creates its lower end cards. However, Intel also likes to differentiate its market, so they also use laser cuts on the back end of the process to disable features. So, it's not entirely a marketing strategy. Hyperthreading has nothing to do with 32 bit code and is actually related to the instruction pipeline. The idea is that, while one part of the core is being used for, say, floating point, the non-FP parts can be used by another thread. HT is really good for certain types of workloads that can benefit from this, image and video editing being one along with VMs, compiling, and other branch-heavy work; in general use computing, its benefits are modest, but they are measureable (if small). i7 does have other advantages, however (higher clock rates, usually; unlocked multiplier in the K models; larger L3 cache in some models; etc.).
Also, 32-bit code can totally use multiple threads and cores, and can benefit from HT. I'm sitting here looking at Excel 2013 32-bit maxing all 6 cores on my desktop chugging through some ugly formulas, and when I fire up my IIS Express 32-bit for some load testing, I'll be using all 12 virtual processors again.
HT shows a benefit for our code when I kick off threads for data fusion, as the part that does FP math is independent of the part that does string manipulation. The HT also helps deal with pipeline stalls when async I/O goes on. It's about a 10% gain, depending on what's going on -- enough to justify the expense of a server.In general, though, yes, if you're looking for the best perceived performance in general usage, SSDs do that. They will not, however, improve graphics quality in XIV (save indirectly), for all the texture loading speed in world won't help Intel HD Graphics.
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((about me | about L'yhta Mahre | L'yhta's desk | about Mysterium, the Ivory Tower: a heavy RP society of mages))
