Intel & AMD Processor Hierarchy (Archive)

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mcconkeymike

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I'm glad you put out a new/updated list, but with respect, I think you need to subdivide some categories again. There is no way that the i5-3550 is even close to being in the same league as a newer i7 or i9.
 

abryant

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Fixed!
 

David_693

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I found that going from an i7 3770 to an i7 7770K a worthwhile jump as I was getting some lag issues with Battlefield 1 and Doom. Everything but the video card (295x2) was replaced and I am pretty happy with the performance. Just waiting for the next gen GPU's to come out.
 
Can I suggest you add the word "gaming" somewhere in the title. Given you're only basing the result on gaming benchmarks calling this a generic "CPU hierarchy" seems a little misleading. Your old articles used to be "Best gaming CPUs for the money" (or something similar), which provided exactly the information the title said they would.

Nice to see these lists back again and in a new format too!
 

This! You cannot use just games to compare these processors, when your own articles indicate that Intel is still superior for gaming, while AMD is better for well-threaded productivity tasks, and streaming games.
Would this mean we should expect a "Productivity" hierarchy, which would likely be different?

This does illustrate that a chart such as this, no matter how accurate, is not the be-all, end-all; people will have their unique use-case which makes any hierarchy only a rough guide; it will help make good choices, but may not call out the best choice. In particular, we see recommendations in the forum all the time that are based on gaming performance, even where an OP has stated that games either aren't a consideration, or are a minor, secondary use.

 

lsatenstein

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Potatoes and Onions. Both grow underground. But they are not the same at all.

I would have appreciated a ranking by category, and then by price vs performance,
Anyone considering a new system, or a corporate upgrade would want the PvP.

When I filter your presentation via number of cores, I get a surprising change in results.

Even further, if I look at the motherboard costs to accompany the selected cpu, I get an even stronger disagreement about price versus performance.

With Intel, a new cpu requires a new motherboard for all new acquisitions.
Not so with AMD. The same motherboard from the Ryzen entry to just below the Ryzen top entry.

Price versus Performance must include motherboard costs.
 


Agreed. With this level of splitting it, we'd need the bare minimum of two, ideally three: Game Usage, Productivity Usage, and Blended Usage

I'd suggest the third for those whose PCs are used for both business and recreation as it would be easier than running down both other charts and manually attempting to balance them. (I have a feeling though that this would have a cluster of CPUs that are in essence, dead-on equal with a 50-50 split in usage.)
 
The CPU hierarchy definitely needed some form of redesign, as all quad-core or higher Intel or AMD Ryzen CPUs from the last five years were getting dumped into the first tier. And you can't just split the tier arbitrarily, since where does one draw the line? Even as it was, a 3550 is in the first tier, while a 2550k is in the second, but in practice their performance should be practically indistinguishable, and the 2550K might even be slightly faster. Aside from AMD getting back in the game with Ryzen, processors haven't really seen a big jump in terms of per-core performance from any one generation to the next in many years, and since most of today's games run fine on a quad-core processor, there isn't a lot to distinguish them. Arguably, all of the first-tier CPUs in the legacy list should do a decent job handling most modern games on a 60Hz screen.

Of course, that should highlight what is arguably an issue with the new format. It may rank the processors by performance in current games in a somewhat more detailed way, but that detail might not even be particularly relevant to most people. If someone has a mid-range to lower-end graphics card, or a 60Hz screen, they will probably not notice any significant difference between the gaming performance of most of the processors in the new list, aside from perhaps the very bottom ones like the dual-core G4560 or a stock-clocked Ryzen 1200 in certain demanding titles.

And that points us to another problem. The new list doesn't account for the fact that all of the Ryzen processors, and some of the higher-end Intel ones, can be overclocked, which can significantly disrupt the standings at certain price levels. While a Ryzen 1200 was in the first tier in the legacy list, and a Pentium G4560 all the way down in the third tier, now suddenly the Pentium is coming out on top, due to its faster (but locked) stock clocks, despite its core deficiency. The main draw of the Ryzen 1200 for gaming would be its ability to be easily overclocked to provide much more competitive performance, even on its stock cooler and a relatively inexpensive motherboard. This new list doesn't reflect that at all, and so a less-capable CPU like the G4560 ends up scoring slightly better. With CPUs getting more cores and threads recently, it's only a matter of time before more games make better use of those additional cores, meaning some CPUs with fewer cores may fall further behind in the years to come. That is of course something that can't be accurately measured though.

Then, we're back to the question of what exactly these abstract numbers mean. On average, a Pentium G4560 might provide somewhere around 61% of the stock gaming performance of an 8700K (at least when paired with a high-end graphics card in this particular test suite on a clean test platform with no notable background processes), but what does that say for frame rates? If someone has a 60Hz screen, and both CPUs were to stay over 60fps in most titles, they might not see much of a difference between them. And in a game like Civilization, even maintaining 60fps might not matter much. The chart might show that one processor can perform better than another in these games, but it doesn't do a very good job of representing how relevant those differences might be. Someone might assume that moving from one CPU to another might give them a substantial boost in performance, but unless they have a high-end graphics card and a high-refresh rate screen at a moderate resolution, they might not actually see much of that performance difference.

The old processor hierarchy chart was a bit of a mess, but I'm not convinced that this new one is that much better in its current form. It might be hard to portray CPU performance in games accurately within a single chart though. Maybe if overclocked performance numbers were included, it could be better, but things would probably be more readable if overclocking was represented in a separate chart. And while showing actual average frame rates might give someone a rough idea if any differences are even relevant to them, those could still be prone to misinterpretation, and just because an average ends up at a particular position, doesn't indicate whether there might be outliers landing well above and below the average, as could be the case with something like a dual-core processor, which could choke on certain games while performing great in others. I can't say that I have a good solution for making such a chart work better, but just thought I'd point these things out.
 

PaulAlcorn

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I appreciate the feedback, it's always appreciated.

We certainly have the data for overclocked configurations. As you know, we OC everything that moves :) . However, we are still proving out and working with this new design, so we didn't include it this round. Our initial concerns with data from our OC results are much the same as yours: we want to present the information in the densest and least confusing format possible.

Perhaps a second chart is the answer, but then it is difficult to ascertain how much performance you gain from overclocking, as you will have to reference another chart. That would become confusing and frustrating very quickly if you are comparing OC capabilities/performance between several processors/families. Perhaps we could add another column with a %-gain figure for the OC section.

There are several axes we can manipulate to show performance, and in a way, there are too many. For instance, we could show performance from every game, both with 99th percentiles and averages, or split the combined results into ST and nT titles, or provide one final number. (Of course, readers also want us to align these into price bands when possible, but our Best CPU article is designed to fulfill that role.)

We are discussing application performance as well, and how/when/where we can integrate that into the hierarchy. Again, we have the data, but there is actually too much data in some cases. We could also split our application test results into separate ST/nT categories, etc. At that point, is it better to just roll that into a separate dedicated hierarchy altogether?

This is certainly a work in progress, and we will refine it as we continue to update the tables. Reader feedback is very important, thanks to all that have commented.
 

Blackbird77

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This is a completely misleading way to see results. CPU's aren't made exclusively for gaming. When you say a 8700K is better than a 1950X in this new "hierarchy", Tom's hardware has completely flushed down the toilet all the other benchmarks that are extremely useful for a lot of people (me included). Feels more like an Intel marketing piece instead of thorough and precise results Tom's has always been known and respected for. BTW, I use Intel chips, and am NOT a fanboy for any camp - I just want fair comparisons. This is a design choice that favors wrong sets of data, misleading readers (and customers) completely. It is like saying a Prius is Better than a Ferrari, no matter what, or vice versa. Depends on what you mean...
 

According to the chart, a 7600K is above a 1950X too. : D

Technically, they did specify that this was for gaming performance in the second paragraph, but I agree with a previous poster that "gaming" should be specified in the title, since a lot of people viewing this will undoubtedly skip past that supporting text to get to the chart. The title and opening paragraph don't make any mention that this is strictly gaming performance across 8 games, on a fresh Windows install with no other software running, which are some caveats that may be worth highlighting.


Maybe some form of image-based bar chart would be better, much like in the reviews, where averages and minimums are included in a single bar. Ideally, overclocked performance could be included in the same bar, but that probably wouldn't work too well if both averages and minimums were in there as well. I kind of like the idea of OC performance being included in the same bar as stock performance though, since that better depicts the overclocks as a range, which could potentially vary depending on cooling and other factors. Of course, an image-based chart could have its own issues, like not being searchable, and making it harder to include referral links with pricing data.
 

AnarchoPrimitiv

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Just reiterating what's already been said, that gaming is but a small portion of CPU use cases, productivity, content creation, etc should be included, especially considering that in a "gaming only" application, nobody is going to buy/use a 1950x or an i9-7960x [unless they have some series confidence issues coupled with a huge ego] so I'm not sure why they're included. As enthusiasts, we can instantly spot these discrepencies, but someone new to the community or buying for someone else (e.g. a gift) will be easily mislead in a variety of ways.
 
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