[SOLVED] Curious about Tom's CPU Hierarchy Chart changing tiers for older CPUs

[1405]

Still being an owner of an old AMD FX-8350, I find myself keeping tabs on its downward progression in Tom's CPU Hierarchy Chart. It started out in the same tier as the lowly 1st gen Intel i7 processors back in 2006-2007: Chart
It has somehow gotten stronger over time 😉 Now, it has been bumped up a tier to be in the same tier as the slightly less lowly 3rd gen Intel i5 processors. What changed? Is it that the 8 threads it has available are finally being utilized in the newer games? Or just someone new writing the charts?

 

[DSzymborski]

Still being an owner of an old AMD FX-8350, I find myself keeping tabs on its downward progression in Tom's CPU Hierarchy Chart. It started out in the same tier as the lowly 1st gen Intel i7 processors back in 2006-2007: Chart
It has somehow gotten stronger over time 😉 Now, it has been bumped up a tier to be in the same tier as the slightly less lowly 3rd gen Intel i5 processors. What changed? Is it that the 8 threads it has available are finally being utilized in the newer games? Or just someone new writing the charts?

You're reading too much into rankings from years apart. The farther you go back in any kind of list like this, the more grouped you'll see out-of-date things. The EGA monitor I got in 1991 was way better than my CGA monitor. They're both junk today.

Games do utilize more threads today, but they utilize more threads in CPUs in which the single-core speed isn't slower than the spread of civil rights in North Korea. The use of more threads has mostly just resulted in old i5s crashing to the junk pile in 2018-2019 rather than 2014-2015 with the FX CPUs.

 

[cryoburner]

Is it that the 8 threads it has available are finally being utilized in the newer games?

If I had to guess, that's probably what it is. Many of those older four-thread i5s and i3s appear to have been knocked down a tier or two at some point, as did the FX processors with fewer than eight threads. The eight-thread FX processors may hold up a bit better in newer games that utilize more threads, though the per-core performance of any processor in the second tier or below is likely to limit performance in many of those titles, at least when performance is not being limited more by lower-end graphics hardware.

That legacy chart is a bit of a mess though. An i5-4430 and an i7-8700K are in the same tier? Ehhh... The newer charts for the newer processors seem to handle rankings better, rather than just grouping processors together in a limited number of tiers.