Intel's Decade-Long Dominance: A Review of the Past Ten Years

As we look back on the past decade, it's clear that Intel has been a dominant force in the CPU market. With their Sandy Bridge architecture, which debuted in 2011, Intel set a new standard for performance and efficiency. This generation of CPUs proved to be incredibly popular, with many users opting for Intel processors over their AMD counterparts.

A Look at Adobe's Rendering Times

To get a better understanding of how Intel's CPUs have performed over the years, we turned to Adobe's rendering times for a 1080p 60Hz 264 video. We're looking at six different CPUs that are relevant to our review: the 4690K, 6600K, 5775X (an imaginary CPU), 7600K, 9900K, and 10900K. The results show that the 6600K finishes the render 13% faster than the 4690K, while the 7600K improves upon the stock performance of the 4790K by 7%. We also see diminishing returns with thread increases, but we've added the 10900K to show that the performance is not artificially limited.

The Impact of Threads

Interestingly, our testing shows that thread increases have had a bigger impact on Adobe's rendering times than we might have expected. This could be due to changes made by Adobe in recent versions of their software. However, with the 9900K, the performance begins to plateau at certain thread counts, suggesting that there may be limitations to how much Intel can improve upon this workload.

AMD Perspectives

For those interested, we've also included some AMD parts on the chart for perspective. The 35X and 3100 are shown here, but our focus is on ten years of Intel. These workloads do torture the CPUs a bit harder, but the hierarchy remains nearly identical. It's worth noting that the 31X shows us that thread increases eventually fall off, which could be an important consideration for those looking to future-proof their builds.

Sandy Bridge Scaling

One of the most impressive things about Sandy Bridge was its ability to scale with overclocking. We've benchmarked this generation annually for three years now, and it's clear that Intel's design has held up incredibly well over time. The fact that so many users have opted for Sandy Bridge CPUs speaks to their enduring popularity.

The Challenges Ahead

As we look to the future, it's clear that Intel faces some challenges in maintaining its dominance. With the introduction of new GPUs, it may become increasingly difficult to create CPU-bound workloads that take advantage of the latest hardware. We'll be testing Intel's 10 series CPUs shortly and reviewing their performance against AMD's offerings.

The State of Intel

Intel started this decade with a strong position in the market, but as the year progressed, they began to lag behind AMD. However, with the introduction of the 5000 series, Intel finally regained its footing. The 6000 series took things to the next level, and now we have the 10 series on our hands. It's worth noting that Intel still needs to hit some kind of silicon process advancement to get back into gear.

The Future is Uncertain

While it's clear that Intel has made significant strides in recent years, there are still some challenges ahead. Will they be able to maintain their dominance over AMD? Only time will tell. For now, we'll have to wait and see how the 10 series performs against its competitors.

Conclusion

In conclusion, our review of the past decade highlights Intel's enduring popularity and dominance in the CPU market. From Sandy Bridge to the present day, Intel has consistently delivered high-performance CPUs that meet the needs of gamers and content creators alike. However, with the introduction of new GPUs and changing workloads, there are challenges ahead for Intel. We'll be testing their 10 series CPUs soon and reviewing their performance against AMD's offerings.

The Benefits of Intel's Mod Mats

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"WEBVTTKind: captionsLanguage: enthe 2010 decade started off exceptionally for Intel nobody could have predicted that Sandy Bridge would have produced the gains that we saw with it and if you did you might have thought that those gains would have continued throughout the next five or so years at least instead what ended up happening was somewhere in the middle of the decade around the 4000 6000 7000 series there was serious stagnation beginning to happen for Intel's parts Intel at the time was content with doing four core 8 thread I sevens over and over and had no competition at all from AMD other than FX parts that were later dragged through a class-action lawsuit so the decade started off strong and today we're doing a revisit of Intel's parts made from about 2010 until about 2019 to look at how the company performed over the years what its percent scaling was and how the asymptotic curve starts to look at what point does it start to flatline four Intel's performance advancements that will carry us into the ten series coming up very shortly before that this video is brought to you by US and the gamers access large mod mat we just received a massive restock and we'll be shipping all back orders and new orders immediately so if you've been waiting for one of our critically acclaimed anti-static PC building services now is a great time to order the mod mats protect your table during builds and include pin out diagrams that we use nearly daily for power testing they also have grids with a silhouette to aid in tracking screws for your own component tear downs and use an anti-static material made by our factory that makes cleaner and parts to help protect sensitive electronics grab your GN mod mat on store documents like cisnet today and it'll ship immediately despite its marketing the Intel 10 series CPUs actually look kind of promising we can't really comment on it yet because we haven't tested it and if we did we'd still be under NDA for it but as of filming we don't have the parts physically in hand so we'll hold our breath on it but the biggest change is that Intel's making is its increasing core account and it's keeping the price at least the same at a given level in the stack where the 10 700 K and a 10 900k damn'd as their names maybe are in better positions than Intel was previously so yes Intel now has as one of the college's pointed out achieve the feat of having something like half or more of its product portfolio in the core series being 14 nanometer silicon and refresh is at that but the company is trying to move forward what we need to do is look back at the previous decade 2600 k 2500 K owners of those CPUs for a long time now from our other revisits you know that you can feel proud about your purchases because those are some phenomenal parts especially once you overclock them they carry well into the 4000 and even 6000 series stock performance in some instances but things did sort of taper out and moving forward where Intel really needs at this point in order to up its competition against Andy is going to be another one of those killer Sandy Bridge parts we'll see if that's the 10 series and even if it is it does have rising to compete with these days but nonetheless competition is in fact a good thing and it's more than just something people say it is what pushes these companies to make better products and reduce the prices so today we're going to be talking about the relative pricing of Intel's old CPUs versus new and how there's been a price creep over the years an increase that exceeds inflation and we'll also be talking through the relative performance from CPU to CPU within and outside of given price brackets so we've got a good amount of games we're narrowing in on almost entirely Intel results on this so don't be mad that you're not seeing a lot of Andy the focus is a decade of Intel we're telling the story of what has Intel's last 10 years what have they looked like how is it progressed that's the focus for perspective we have included AMD parts and solve these charts some of them have a few more than others but we've got at least an AMD r5 3600 when talking about high fives at least in a.m. the r7 3700 X been talking about i7 and sometimes more than that so our focus again is Intel today if you want to see AMD benchmarks we have a brand new testing methodology getting deployed probably in tomorrow's video with tests from both vendors and then we're going to be starting to roll out some new videos using that methodology so stay tuned for that but let's get started with a decade of Intel in review GTA 5 is a great game to start with for this civic benchmark and that's because it's old enough to have been new when several these CPUs we're still coming out hard note here our next chart looks at a new game because that's important for core utilization that's changed a lot over the years we'll start with just a breakout chart highlighting the key i5 CPUs so that'd be the 2500 k35 70k 4690k 600 K 7600 K 8400 and the 9600 K first we should point out how a tightly packed some of these CPUs are ignoring overclocked data the top to bottom rein just 49 FPS for the gap or an improvement of 77% over a 10-year period if we restrict that down to the 4690k which launched in 2014 the stock improvement is about 43% those aren't great numbers and show exactly why everyone has almost wholesale stopped talking about i5 CPUs the higher-end CPUs have shown great gains but I 5 has become the dumping ground for intel's filler part and that's why it's lost the battle - and these are 5 Series the decade started 5 years before GTA 5 came out but the 2500 K plotting a 64 FPS average and loads that are actually sustainable shows that it's still strong even 5 years after its launch the 2500 K is able to hold on at playable frame rates and frame times on new games while new ish in this case the 35 to 70 K came out in 2012 for $250 following the 2500 KS 216 dollar prize with an uplift of nine point seven percent as the generations went on those improvements condensed the 7600 K only improved 6% over the 6600 K and that's the era we started telling our readers not to upgrade if they had the previous series part in their system already we'll come back to GTA 5 in a second for i7 parts but we need some contacts for actual i-5 improvement over the years for that let's look at a more modern game for shadow of the Tomb Raider with just the i5 CPU is we see a far greater scale than in GTA 5 this is obviously because of an increase in core utilization with newer titles and is highlighted by the now larger gap of about one hundred and sixty three percent increase from the 2,500 case stock to the 9600 case stock that looks a lot better the 2500 K is still something of a beast for a decade-old part but it's not as impressive here as it was in an older title the thirty-five 70k gained about 14% the 4690k canned about 17% over the 35 70 K and the 6600 K gained 21% over that the 4690k overclocked is found above the stock 6600 K and is exactly why that was around the time when we stopped recommending upgrades again for owners who had recent parts that's still a massive jump for both to be fair the 8400 really piled it on though and gained 56% over the stock 6600 K CPU this isn't even the 80 600 K part which we haven't retested recently the key difference of course was the core count increased the 9600 K became boring again at three point eight percent gained unfortunately but OC hadn't pushed it the rest of the way switching over to an i7 chart borrowing the i9 since it's totally different in price class and also not an i7 we returned to GT a momentarily remember that the 9700 K is $380 to $400 retail while the older i7 part's ranged from 317 to $350 we've also added the ice of a 930 in a hail important here but it's older than our decade marker astute viewers will notice that the 2600 K is about the same as the 2500 K in performance and even slightly lower this was back when hyper-threading sometimes had more overhead than it had benefit and so you'd occasionally see about a 1% gain performance hit between i5 and i7 parts that were otherwise identical that's why an i5 is not for gaming came about because it was not only accurate to say but it was often technically the better purchase the lack of differentiation between i5 and i7 parts faded away with time though the top to bottom range starting at the 2600 K to 9700 K stock is 95% for 10 years or 36% for 6 years at the 4790k the i7 CPU is stagnated around the 6700 to 8700 k era in older games like this but the 8700 K became an important CPU for newer games and for applications with more thread dependence this was when Intel and AMD were rapidly releasing new parts one after the other and it was a close battle where the 87 hard K was able to win back some of the applications that Intel had lost with the rise and launch one thing's for damn sure though nothing quite overclocked like the same Brij parts that jump is colossal at 26% improved over its own stock results the 2600 K remains one of the best CPUs that's come out in the last decade we partially missed these days but it also just means that both AMD and Intel or shipping parts closer to maximum performance before moving on here's a chart of all the i5 i7 + i9 non HED T CPUs for GTA 5 the 99 RK clearly chokes on the limitations of this game providing no value over the 9700 K or even an overclocked to 9600 K more importantly look at the 2500 K versus the 2600 K they're about the same and some hyper threading overhead is visible outside of test variants the 4690k and 4790k have a clear Delta at 6.8% improved on the i7 the sixty six hundred and sixty seven hundred KS show similar at a 6.5 percent increase still it's obvious why an i5 4690k was the best gaming buy at a time and why these 6600 K mostly followed no one wanted to pay an extra $100 between board and CPU to gain 6% frame rate especially with an e zi v OC time to move on here's the chart for Tomb Raider again but for i7 CPUs the previous and current decades bled together with the i7 930 which is actually a surprisingly strong performer in this game but the 2600 K is where will officially start the discussion stock 2600 k2 stock 9700 K the improvement is about 129 percent over 10 years not as much as in the i5 series which saw a paradigm shift that increased the thread count but still better than GTA 5 s results the 2600 K overclock is another high score with a 31% increase which you never hear of today and that helps compound the difficulty of advancing CPUs Intel has shrunken OC Headroom as a byproduct of increasing out of box frequencies closer to their limits but still had generational slowdowns in the 6,000 and 7,000 eras one a refresh of the other and then again in the 9000 and 8000 era where we had a refresh of basically a refresh the 8700 K is interesting because it's extra threads make it actually better in some applications but the 9700 K does make up for any deaf with increased frequency Headroom the 2600 case docked to 4790k stock jump was 48 percent skipping one generation 3000 or 14 percent from the OC 2600 k 4790k to 6700 k which was the real jump pushed 24% higher the 7700 K was 3.8 percent higher yikes and the 8700 K was 15% better than that here's the chart of all the desktop CPUs for Intel that we've tested lately plus the 3700 X the 99 hundred KS nine hundred K and 9700 k OC are all reaching the upper bound of the GPU and so we're starting to encounter GPU bottleneck in this particular game we see the opposite of GTA the 2500 K and 2600 K actually have a meaningful gap between them about 32% higher on the i7 and that's thanks to higher core dependence with newer titles this is great historical information on why everyone including us was completely content with recommending an i5 for gaming background B has well and surrounding generations these types of games didn't really exist yet at least not very many of them did Assassin's Creed is next this is another series where a core account really started to matter the top to bottom range Frye 5 CPUs runs 125 percent from the 2500 K at 51 FPS average to 114 FPS average the i5 CPUs have another very clear division in the chart just like Tomb Raider there's a 39% climb from the 7600 K to the 8400 which isn't even a case Q part and that's a clear benefit of the core account increase the 9600 K posted smaller gains and smaller still if we had a fresh 86 100 K retested here but overclocking Headroom of the 9000 series allowed it some room to grow the trouble of course is that this would eat into the performance growth for the next generation part if it remained on 6 cores and six threats since Intel is about at its limits of frequency for this process fortunately for Intel it has restructured the core account for the entire stack so this stagnation should be at least temporarily resolved we'll likely see another large jump in appropriate games the gains are like this 2500 K to 35 70 K we saw a 13% increase 4690 to 600 K stock was a noteworthy 21 percent but the 4690k OC gave us 24% and surpassed the stock's kay the 7600 keg and a dismal 2.6 percent over the 6600 K showing stagnation and the 8000 series temporarily resolves that here's the i7 chart the 9700 K really establishes a firm lead over intel's previous 8700 k despite a lower thread count this is where modern games start to really work well on eight cores and the higher frequency and lower resource contention accomplishes the rest the 2600 case told as well at 58 FPS average and our top to bottom gain is 140 percent stock to stock the 2600 k OC was insane once again gaining significantly and encroaching on intel's smothered child the 5775 see that it wants you to forget about the 4790k gained 46 percent over the 2600 k by skipping a generation or 26 percent comparing the 4.8 gigahertz 4790k to the 4.7 gigahertz 2600 k the 6700 K showed that the curve was slowing to an asymptotic plateau at fourteen point seven percent gained than a measly two percent gain with the 7700 K the 8700 K jumped back to 14 percent then 23 percent for the 9700 cave that's more of what we want to see and what hopefully we'll see with the 10 series of Intel desktop CPUs but that 7700 K and the era surrounding it I was a little bit rough here's the chart for everything the interesting note is the i-580 400s performance over the 7700 K where it's even clearer that newer games then the 6600 K started caring more about the extra cores for core 8 thread setups aren't always as good or better than the six core 6 thread setups it depends on the application some of that is thanks to consoles where the higher core count designs have advanced games to finally start leveraging them and that's just a matter of testing games from different eras where that was already a change in place with the consoles the 9900 kks and 9700 KOC results are all bumping off the GPU bottleneck so we can't really see the full top range of performance here civilization 6 is next which is more of a frequency happy test that doesn't care as much for cores and this one Intel's generational gains aren't as impressive as in the previous two games it's more like GTA we see a 30% reduction in turn time requirement between the stock 9600 K and side 2,500 K so that's ten years to get you a 30% reduction and turn time required but the stat math gets a bit funny here since we're now talking about reduction rather than an increase if you converted this to scoring and started by highest it'd be equivalent to about an 80% increase in performance that's significantly below still the 120 to 140 percent marker we saw in more thread dependent titles and is more of what people think of when they picture Intel generational stagnation prior to the 8000 series the 2500 K is a 35 70 K jump is just a six point four percent reduction 3570 k2 4690k is a more noteworthy 10% reduction 6600 K is faster by an additional ten point four percent over the 4690k and on the 4690k OC leads that the 7600 K a six percent reduction this time and on the i5 8400 did nothing to fix that and neither would the 8600 cage maybe to a less significant degree here's the full chart the 2600 K and 2500 K did have a meaningful gap in this one but the 3570 K didn't move very much versus the previous i7 other interesting notes are that the 900 K and KS illustrate the frequency being responsible for the top of chart gains as 40 nanometer hits the final limits with Intel TBB is stretching 100 megahertz more sometimes in 10th gen if you call it a Gen Intel is going to need new tricks after the 10th series to keep pushing further everyone 2018 is also a frequency happy application in this one we see an 88% gain from the 2500 kf5 9600 K this is the type of game that created the feeling of stagnation as well unlike Tomb Raider and assassin's creed here we're seeing limited gains of about 7% from 35 to 70 K to 4690k and just 10% from the 4690k it's a 6600 case stock that's without even considering overclocking the 2600 K at 4.7 gigahertz makes purchasers of Sandy Bridge no doubt feel smug or at least prideful in their choice the i7 series outside of this one was similar overall to the i5 series with the 6700 K only gaining about seven and a half percent performance over the 4790k and the 9900 Kaos shows that there's still somehow room in our 300 FPS plus range to gain more frames with an overclock this is the type of game where ten series probably won't look as good since it won't be able to leverage its threat increases as well and we'll have to rely on the smaller 100 megahertz gains in boost hitman 2 with dx12 is an interesting one here we see the larger top-to-bottom range emerging between the 9600 k stock and 2500 case stock it's about a 115 percent gain over the decade and i5 performance increases for i7s it's a gain from sixty six point six FPS average to 140 FPS average or 111 percent the 2600 K gets another shoutout for its overclock nearly matching a many years later released 7600 K and outdoing it in frame time consistency as well thanks to the higher thread count while the 6700 K gets a nod for out doing the 9600 K s stock CPU the 9900 K s demonstrates that the upper limit of this is the GPU at around 144 FPS average so we don't have the test resolution to see scaling beyond a stock 9700 K this is also going to become a challenge for new CPUs although we could synthetically create more CPU load by driving graphics options down at some point you exit realism it won't be until the 3000 series on video cards that this range will expand easily let's switch over to some production discussion we'll begin our benchmarks with an all core workload just because it's an easier point to evaluate there are fewer variables involved and it's a purist look at CPU performance over the ages our blender monkeyhead render starts us off before doing the full Intel chart we're beginning with the look at only Intel CPUs that launched at 317 to $380 this is the old i7 class before an i-9 shuffled the entire stack and everyone's expectations with it the 317 dollar Intel i7 2602 sender in 65 minutes with an overclock improving performance by 23% we don't have a 3770k on here so we'll skip one generation the 4790k offered an improvement over the 2600 K of about 34% from stock to stock doing so at about a 30 dollar premium overclocking Headroom was more limited as this was already a better version of the 4770k and restricted us to 7.8 percent reduction in time required the 5775 seeds had worse than the 4790k but was also a weird cpu that intel forgot about and immediately buried with these 6700 K the 67 100k reduced render time by 8.3 percent over the 4790k and that's the 7700 K reduced render time by six point three percent at this point and tells generational gains had dropped from double digits between the Halo and Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge to Devil's Canyon all the way down to low single digits on these 7700 K the 87 R K changed this up thanks to pressure from AMD bringing higher core countdown to the $380 part the improvement versus the 7700 K it was a mass of 30% but you can't do that forever without killing the entire high end the 9700 K 1 in the opposite direction while costing roughly the same about 380 to $400 retail and suffered from a greedy choice to cut hyper-threading this worsened the i7 generationally and the 97 under K only survived on his frequency that I earn hundred K isn't shown because its price is at $500 but for verbal reference its performance has it about 20 minutes stock or 17 minutes overclocked the GN logo render is next the reason the 2600 K has such a profound legacy is because of moments like this where it can cut a 91 minute render time down to 68 minutes or 25% reduction there's a 38% render time reduction going from the stock 2600 k2 4790k stock then a hike to the 57 25 C then a reduction to the 6700 K that drop is 11% still in the double digits the 6700 case stocks at 7700 K stock is only a 6% reduction while the overclocked 6700 K actually outperforms the stock 7700 again this is where Intel ran into its severe stagnation problems more pronounced than even 4,000 to 6,000 in this instance and it had to change the 8700 K got it back on track and then the 97 hard k stagnated again these are all CPUs that launched at about the same price so intel has run into very real limitations about pacing its architectural improvements with its product release cycle and it was reluctant or unable to add more cores in at these 300 to 400 marks with the result being a further widening of the void the chart for all of the blender results looks like this for the monkey heads we've removed several of these 7,000 and 9,000 h EDT parts since they're basically the same as that's 10 series HDD t parts for the most part and the chart was getting too cluttered anyway the 9 out her K is well positioned here relative to past and present CPUs but we'd argue that the 8700 and the i7 2600k remain the two best value CPUs on this chart from this series of course we're talking respective to the time that they came out the 8700 K was a real kick to the teeth for Andy's new risin 7 1700 and put Intel back in a competitive position but that time was short-lived as Intel pushed the cpu out before supply was even ready before boards were even ready and then had nothing left to work with the 99er k was its next big move but that also moved to the price and it'll significantly higher than the rest of the stack something which the newly announced 10 series dt parts are correcting the i5 lineup at least impressed in one way previously the 4690k brought nearly 2,600 K performance except to add a price reduction to $240 that was a meaningful change and the 4690k was one of the best gaming parts at the time as well it was a huge leap about 18.5% from the 35 70 K previously here even the 35 70 K improved over the 2500 K by 12% on its own let's move on to another application 7 said compression and decompression our next starting with the latter the decompression results show limited generational gains in some instances like the seven and a half percent jump from the 2500 K to the 35 70 K but there's an overall 119 percent increase from the 2500 case stock to 9600 case stock CPUs some results are less impressive like the fact that it took intel for numerical generations not the same as actual generations to get the i7 2670 and i5 6600 k part the i7 6700k though gained about 44 percent over the 2600 k in that same time for i7 cpu is the 9700 k to 2600 k void is a 141 percent increase with the overclock producing some extra value at the top and this is an interesting chart where generationally the differences are sometimes small from one to the next the 6700 K to 7700 K in this instance or the 2600 k OC nearly equal in the 6700 K 5 years later as IPC increases and core count ticks up we can see the gap wide and Intel needs to keep this trend into the 10 series of desktop CPUs in to get an advancement into the double digits and they might do it with the core account to increase at similar prices to nine serious CPUs so the 3700 X is great perspective for Intel's positioning as as the 3600 a $200 part that outperforms most of Intel's lineup for compression the story is similar the 2500 km 9600 K improvement is 117 percent while the 2600 K it some 9700 K improvement is 129 percent the 9900 K increases the ceiling but it also increased the price it's the 10 series where we should see another meaningful jump in all these charts at hopefully lower prices closer to the original cost of the chips this last chart doesn't follow our theme Foley it's only six years of Intel CPUs so we apologize for that but it's still a good representation we're looking at Adobe from your render time for a 1080p 60hz 264 video this is for all the CPUs that are relevant here the 4690k finishes the render and nine and a half minutes while the 6600 K gets a market 13% render time reduction keep in mind that the 5775 see as an imaginary CPU that no one could buy so the 6600 K is basically the actual generational step the 7600 K improved 7% which brought it to 4790k stock performance from a few years prior on this chart we're seeing a bigger impact from threads than we might have in years past a change that adobe made in recent versions we see diminishing returns though with the 9900 K but just to show that the performance is not artificially limited we've added the 10 980 accion this chart to show us the real seal inner floor if you prefer a performance while the 31 35 X shows us that thread increases eventually fall off a few AMD parts are also scattered for perspective if you want to pause it and look at those but our focus is on ten years of Intel not much changes on the 4k chart in the hierarchy there's a harder line drawn at thread increases between the 9900 K and 3950 X so this workload does torture the CPUs a bit harder but the hierarchy is nearly identical other than a few shifts looking back at all this data then it's always kind of eye-opening to see just how well Sandy Bridge scaled with overclocking we've read benchmarked Sandy Bridge annually for like three years now there's a reason for it a lot of people bought those CPUs and a lot of people really care about the numbers today because they're still good but either way the 10 series is going to be an important one to consider here Intel is probably almost certainly at this point going to stay at the top and gaming charts there becomes a difficulty for Intel where now the CPS are getting fast enough and there hasn't been a new GPU generation that you're starting to really have to try to create a CPU bound load in games to the point where it might not be as realistic anymore and we don't ever test 720p the only time we did that was maybe one article for early I GPS and apu is probably circa 2013 or something like that maybe 2012 but we always stick with at least 1080p baseline 1440p and for the most part a lot of games are obviously GPU bound so yes you can create a bottleneck but there's a reasonable level given Sandy Bridge is phenomenal positioning in the market it's hard to believe that Intel will start this decade with the same position that Sandy Bridge did if we look at AMD right now it seems like perhaps there are 3000 series parts or about where that was Rison one like the 1700 good part it wasn't really competitive head-to-head and gaming just yet it was one of those well it does well enough and if you want the threads for other tasks like production workloads then go for it but otherwise if you just want a game keep buying Intel at the top end that started changing when Intel's top end serious competitors got to four hundred and five hundred dollars so Rison 1000 is probably comparable to Nehalem and Rison two or three thousand might be the Sandy Bridge analog so whether Intel's 10 series can achieve the same level of status as Sandy Bridge that remains to be seen obviously we'll be testing that shortly and reviews coming up sometime in the future in May so keep an eye on that but that's your decade and review certainly if it hadn't been already known Intel had a very strong start to the decade it flatlined in the center with four thousand six thousand seven thousand five thousand doesn't really count until buried that with six thousand immediately that was the true successor in desktop but 5000 was very good for the things it was good at it's unfortunately got buried and then later on eight thousand nine thousand but particularly eight thousand Intel started to wake up again so now ten series is we're gonna see okay have they actually fully woken up where does Intel still need to hit some kind of silicon process advanced to get back into gear check back for all that subscribe for more as always you can get a straw document excess net to grab one of our large mod mats we've just restocked them we were out of stock for a long time due to a mix of human malware and other shipping logistics challenges surrounding that but they're back now so visit the store if you want to pick one up or go to patreon.com/scishow and axis it helps out there as well we'll see you all next timethe 2010 decade started off exceptionally for Intel nobody could have predicted that Sandy Bridge would have produced the gains that we saw with it and if you did you might have thought that those gains would have continued throughout the next five or so years at least instead what ended up happening was somewhere in the middle of the decade around the 4000 6000 7000 series there was serious stagnation beginning to happen for Intel's parts Intel at the time was content with doing four core 8 thread I sevens over and over and had no competition at all from AMD other than FX parts that were later dragged through a class-action lawsuit so the decade started off strong and today we're doing a revisit of Intel's parts made from about 2010 until about 2019 to look at how the company performed over the years what its percent scaling was and how the asymptotic curve starts to look at what point does it start to flatline four Intel's performance advancements that will carry us into the ten series coming up very shortly before that this video is brought to you by US and the gamers access large mod mat we just received a massive restock and we'll be shipping all back orders and new orders immediately so if you've been waiting for one of our critically acclaimed anti-static PC building services now is a great time to order the mod mats protect your table during builds and include pin out diagrams that we use nearly daily for power testing they also have grids with a silhouette to aid in tracking screws for your own component tear downs and use an anti-static material made by our factory that makes cleaner and parts to help protect sensitive electronics grab your GN mod mat on store documents like cisnet today and it'll ship immediately despite its marketing the Intel 10 series CPUs actually look kind of promising we can't really comment on it yet because we haven't tested it and if we did we'd still be under NDA for it but as of filming we don't have the parts physically in hand so we'll hold our breath on it but the biggest change is that Intel's making is its increasing core account and it's keeping the price at least the same at a given level in the stack where the 10 700 K and a 10 900k damn'd as their names maybe are in better positions than Intel was previously so yes Intel now has as one of the college's pointed out achieve the feat of having something like half or more of its product portfolio in the core series being 14 nanometer silicon and refresh is at that but the company is trying to move forward what we need to do is look back at the previous decade 2600 k 2500 K owners of those CPUs for a long time now from our other revisits you know that you can feel proud about your purchases because those are some phenomenal parts especially once you overclock them they carry well into the 4000 and even 6000 series stock performance in some instances but things did sort of taper out and moving forward where Intel really needs at this point in order to up its competition against Andy is going to be another one of those killer Sandy Bridge parts we'll see if that's the 10 series and even if it is it does have rising to compete with these days but nonetheless competition is in fact a good thing and it's more than just something people say it is what pushes these companies to make better products and reduce the prices so today we're going to be talking about the relative pricing of Intel's old CPUs versus new and how there's been a price creep over the years an increase that exceeds inflation and we'll also be talking through the relative performance from CPU to CPU within and outside of given price brackets so we've got a good amount of games we're narrowing in on almost entirely Intel results on this so don't be mad that you're not seeing a lot of Andy the focus is a decade of Intel we're telling the story of what has Intel's last 10 years what have they looked like how is it progressed that's the focus for perspective we have included AMD parts and solve these charts some of them have a few more than others but we've got at least an AMD r5 3600 when talking about high fives at least in a.m. the r7 3700 X been talking about i7 and sometimes more than that so our focus again is Intel today if you want to see AMD benchmarks we have a brand new testing methodology getting deployed probably in tomorrow's video with tests from both vendors and then we're going to be starting to roll out some new videos using that methodology so stay tuned for that but let's get started with a decade of Intel in review GTA 5 is a great game to start with for this civic benchmark and that's because it's old enough to have been new when several these CPUs we're still coming out hard note here our next chart looks at a new game because that's important for core utilization that's changed a lot over the years we'll start with just a breakout chart highlighting the key i5 CPUs so that'd be the 2500 k35 70k 4690k 600 K 7600 K 8400 and the 9600 K first we should point out how a tightly packed some of these CPUs are ignoring overclocked data the top to bottom rein just 49 FPS for the gap or an improvement of 77% over a 10-year period if we restrict that down to the 4690k which launched in 2014 the stock improvement is about 43% those aren't great numbers and show exactly why everyone has almost wholesale stopped talking about i5 CPUs the higher-end CPUs have shown great gains but I 5 has become the dumping ground for intel's filler part and that's why it's lost the battle - and these are 5 Series the decade started 5 years before GTA 5 came out but the 2500 K plotting a 64 FPS average and loads that are actually sustainable shows that it's still strong even 5 years after its launch the 2500 K is able to hold on at playable frame rates and frame times on new games while new ish in this case the 35 to 70 K came out in 2012 for $250 following the 2500 KS 216 dollar prize with an uplift of nine point seven percent as the generations went on those improvements condensed the 7600 K only improved 6% over the 6600 K and that's the era we started telling our readers not to upgrade if they had the previous series part in their system already we'll come back to GTA 5 in a second for i7 parts but we need some contacts for actual i-5 improvement over the years for that let's look at a more modern game for shadow of the Tomb Raider with just the i5 CPU is we see a far greater scale than in GTA 5 this is obviously because of an increase in core utilization with newer titles and is highlighted by the now larger gap of about one hundred and sixty three percent increase from the 2,500 case stock to the 9600 case stock that looks a lot better the 2500 K is still something of a beast for a decade-old part but it's not as impressive here as it was in an older title the thirty-five 70k gained about 14% the 4690k canned about 17% over the 35 70 K and the 6600 K gained 21% over that the 4690k overclocked is found above the stock 6600 K and is exactly why that was around the time when we stopped recommending upgrades again for owners who had recent parts that's still a massive jump for both to be fair the 8400 really piled it on though and gained 56% over the stock 6600 K CPU this isn't even the 80 600 K part which we haven't retested recently the key difference of course was the core count increased the 9600 K became boring again at three point eight percent gained unfortunately but OC hadn't pushed it the rest of the way switching over to an i7 chart borrowing the i9 since it's totally different in price class and also not an i7 we returned to GT a momentarily remember that the 9700 K is $380 to $400 retail while the older i7 part's ranged from 317 to $350 we've also added the ice of a 930 in a hail important here but it's older than our decade marker astute viewers will notice that the 2600 K is about the same as the 2500 K in performance and even slightly lower this was back when hyper-threading sometimes had more overhead than it had benefit and so you'd occasionally see about a 1% gain performance hit between i5 and i7 parts that were otherwise identical that's why an i5 is not for gaming came about because it was not only accurate to say but it was often technically the better purchase the lack of differentiation between i5 and i7 parts faded away with time though the top to bottom range starting at the 2600 K to 9700 K stock is 95% for 10 years or 36% for 6 years at the 4790k the i7 CPU is stagnated around the 6700 to 8700 k era in older games like this but the 8700 K became an important CPU for newer games and for applications with more thread dependence this was when Intel and AMD were rapidly releasing new parts one after the other and it was a close battle where the 87 hard K was able to win back some of the applications that Intel had lost with the rise and launch one thing's for damn sure though nothing quite overclocked like the same Brij parts that jump is colossal at 26% improved over its own stock results the 2600 K remains one of the best CPUs that's come out in the last decade we partially missed these days but it also just means that both AMD and Intel or shipping parts closer to maximum performance before moving on here's a chart of all the i5 i7 + i9 non HED T CPUs for GTA 5 the 99 RK clearly chokes on the limitations of this game providing no value over the 9700 K or even an overclocked to 9600 K more importantly look at the 2500 K versus the 2600 K they're about the same and some hyper threading overhead is visible outside of test variants the 4690k and 4790k have a clear Delta at 6.8% improved on the i7 the sixty six hundred and sixty seven hundred KS show similar at a 6.5 percent increase still it's obvious why an i5 4690k was the best gaming buy at a time and why these 6600 K mostly followed no one wanted to pay an extra $100 between board and CPU to gain 6% frame rate especially with an e zi v OC time to move on here's the chart for Tomb Raider again but for i7 CPUs the previous and current decades bled together with the i7 930 which is actually a surprisingly strong performer in this game but the 2600 K is where will officially start the discussion stock 2600 k2 stock 9700 K the improvement is about 129 percent over 10 years not as much as in the i5 series which saw a paradigm shift that increased the thread count but still better than GTA 5 s results the 2600 K overclock is another high score with a 31% increase which you never hear of today and that helps compound the difficulty of advancing CPUs Intel has shrunken OC Headroom as a byproduct of increasing out of box frequencies closer to their limits but still had generational slowdowns in the 6,000 and 7,000 eras one a refresh of the other and then again in the 9000 and 8000 era where we had a refresh of basically a refresh the 8700 K is interesting because it's extra threads make it actually better in some applications but the 9700 K does make up for any deaf with increased frequency Headroom the 2600 case docked to 4790k stock jump was 48 percent skipping one generation 3000 or 14 percent from the OC 2600 k 4790k to 6700 k which was the real jump pushed 24% higher the 7700 K was 3.8 percent higher yikes and the 8700 K was 15% better than that here's the chart of all the desktop CPUs for Intel that we've tested lately plus the 3700 X the 99 hundred KS nine hundred K and 9700 k OC are all reaching the upper bound of the GPU and so we're starting to encounter GPU bottleneck in this particular game we see the opposite of GTA the 2500 K and 2600 K actually have a meaningful gap between them about 32% higher on the i7 and that's thanks to higher core dependence with newer titles this is great historical information on why everyone including us was completely content with recommending an i5 for gaming background B has well and surrounding generations these types of games didn't really exist yet at least not very many of them did Assassin's Creed is next this is another series where a core account really started to matter the top to bottom range Frye 5 CPUs runs 125 percent from the 2500 K at 51 FPS average to 114 FPS average the i5 CPUs have another very clear division in the chart just like Tomb Raider there's a 39% climb from the 7600 K to the 8400 which isn't even a case Q part and that's a clear benefit of the core account increase the 9600 K posted smaller gains and smaller still if we had a fresh 86 100 K retested here but overclocking Headroom of the 9000 series allowed it some room to grow the trouble of course is that this would eat into the performance growth for the next generation part if it remained on 6 cores and six threats since Intel is about at its limits of frequency for this process fortunately for Intel it has restructured the core account for the entire stack so this stagnation should be at least temporarily resolved we'll likely see another large jump in appropriate games the gains are like this 2500 K to 35 70 K we saw a 13% increase 4690 to 600 K stock was a noteworthy 21 percent but the 4690k OC gave us 24% and surpassed the stock's kay the 7600 keg and a dismal 2.6 percent over the 6600 K showing stagnation and the 8000 series temporarily resolves that here's the i7 chart the 9700 K really establishes a firm lead over intel's previous 8700 k despite a lower thread count this is where modern games start to really work well on eight cores and the higher frequency and lower resource contention accomplishes the rest the 2600 case told as well at 58 FPS average and our top to bottom gain is 140 percent stock to stock the 2600 k OC was insane once again gaining significantly and encroaching on intel's smothered child the 5775 see that it wants you to forget about the 4790k gained 46 percent over the 2600 k by skipping a generation or 26 percent comparing the 4.8 gigahertz 4790k to the 4.7 gigahertz 2600 k the 6700 K showed that the curve was slowing to an asymptotic plateau at fourteen point seven percent gained than a measly two percent gain with the 7700 K the 8700 K jumped back to 14 percent then 23 percent for the 9700 cave that's more of what we want to see and what hopefully we'll see with the 10 series of Intel desktop CPUs but that 7700 K and the era surrounding it I was a little bit rough here's the chart for everything the interesting note is the i-580 400s performance over the 7700 K where it's even clearer that newer games then the 6600 K started caring more about the extra cores for core 8 thread setups aren't always as good or better than the six core 6 thread setups it depends on the application some of that is thanks to consoles where the higher core count designs have advanced games to finally start leveraging them and that's just a matter of testing games from different eras where that was already a change in place with the consoles the 9900 kks and 9700 KOC results are all bumping off the GPU bottleneck so we can't really see the full top range of performance here civilization 6 is next which is more of a frequency happy test that doesn't care as much for cores and this one Intel's generational gains aren't as impressive as in the previous two games it's more like GTA we see a 30% reduction in turn time requirement between the stock 9600 K and side 2,500 K so that's ten years to get you a 30% reduction and turn time required but the stat math gets a bit funny here since we're now talking about reduction rather than an increase if you converted this to scoring and started by highest it'd be equivalent to about an 80% increase in performance that's significantly below still the 120 to 140 percent marker we saw in more thread dependent titles and is more of what people think of when they picture Intel generational stagnation prior to the 8000 series the 2500 K is a 35 70 K jump is just a six point four percent reduction 3570 k2 4690k is a more noteworthy 10% reduction 6600 K is faster by an additional ten point four percent over the 4690k and on the 4690k OC leads that the 7600 K a six percent reduction this time and on the i5 8400 did nothing to fix that and neither would the 8600 cage maybe to a less significant degree here's the full chart the 2600 K and 2500 K did have a meaningful gap in this one but the 3570 K didn't move very much versus the previous i7 other interesting notes are that the 900 K and KS illustrate the frequency being responsible for the top of chart gains as 40 nanometer hits the final limits with Intel TBB is stretching 100 megahertz more sometimes in 10th gen if you call it a Gen Intel is going to need new tricks after the 10th series to keep pushing further everyone 2018 is also a frequency happy application in this one we see an 88% gain from the 2500 kf5 9600 K this is the type of game that created the feeling of stagnation as well unlike Tomb Raider and assassin's creed here we're seeing limited gains of about 7% from 35 to 70 K to 4690k and just 10% from the 4690k it's a 6600 case stock that's without even considering overclocking the 2600 K at 4.7 gigahertz makes purchasers of Sandy Bridge no doubt feel smug or at least prideful in their choice the i7 series outside of this one was similar overall to the i5 series with the 6700 K only gaining about seven and a half percent performance over the 4790k and the 9900 Kaos shows that there's still somehow room in our 300 FPS plus range to gain more frames with an overclock this is the type of game where ten series probably won't look as good since it won't be able to leverage its threat increases as well and we'll have to rely on the smaller 100 megahertz gains in boost hitman 2 with dx12 is an interesting one here we see the larger top-to-bottom range emerging between the 9600 k stock and 2500 case stock it's about a 115 percent gain over the decade and i5 performance increases for i7s it's a gain from sixty six point six FPS average to 140 FPS average or 111 percent the 2600 K gets another shoutout for its overclock nearly matching a many years later released 7600 K and outdoing it in frame time consistency as well thanks to the higher thread count while the 6700 K gets a nod for out doing the 9600 K s stock CPU the 9900 K s demonstrates that the upper limit of this is the GPU at around 144 FPS average so we don't have the test resolution to see scaling beyond a stock 9700 K this is also going to become a challenge for new CPUs although we could synthetically create more CPU load by driving graphics options down at some point you exit realism it won't be until the 3000 series on video cards that this range will expand easily let's switch over to some production discussion we'll begin our benchmarks with an all core workload just because it's an easier point to evaluate there are fewer variables involved and it's a purist look at CPU performance over the ages our blender monkeyhead render starts us off before doing the full Intel chart we're beginning with the look at only Intel CPUs that launched at 317 to $380 this is the old i7 class before an i-9 shuffled the entire stack and everyone's expectations with it the 317 dollar Intel i7 2602 sender in 65 minutes with an overclock improving performance by 23% we don't have a 3770k on here so we'll skip one generation the 4790k offered an improvement over the 2600 K of about 34% from stock to stock doing so at about a 30 dollar premium overclocking Headroom was more limited as this was already a better version of the 4770k and restricted us to 7.8 percent reduction in time required the 5775 seeds had worse than the 4790k but was also a weird cpu that intel forgot about and immediately buried with these 6700 K the 67 100k reduced render time by 8.3 percent over the 4790k and that's the 7700 K reduced render time by six point three percent at this point and tells generational gains had dropped from double digits between the Halo and Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge to Devil's Canyon all the way down to low single digits on these 7700 K the 87 R K changed this up thanks to pressure from AMD bringing higher core countdown to the $380 part the improvement versus the 7700 K it was a mass of 30% but you can't do that forever without killing the entire high end the 9700 K 1 in the opposite direction while costing roughly the same about 380 to $400 retail and suffered from a greedy choice to cut hyper-threading this worsened the i7 generationally and the 97 under K only survived on his frequency that I earn hundred K isn't shown because its price is at $500 but for verbal reference its performance has it about 20 minutes stock or 17 minutes overclocked the GN logo render is next the reason the 2600 K has such a profound legacy is because of moments like this where it can cut a 91 minute render time down to 68 minutes or 25% reduction there's a 38% render time reduction going from the stock 2600 k2 4790k stock then a hike to the 57 25 C then a reduction to the 6700 K that drop is 11% still in the double digits the 6700 case stocks at 7700 K stock is only a 6% reduction while the overclocked 6700 K actually outperforms the stock 7700 again this is where Intel ran into its severe stagnation problems more pronounced than even 4,000 to 6,000 in this instance and it had to change the 8700 K got it back on track and then the 97 hard k stagnated again these are all CPUs that launched at about the same price so intel has run into very real limitations about pacing its architectural improvements with its product release cycle and it was reluctant or unable to add more cores in at these 300 to 400 marks with the result being a further widening of the void the chart for all of the blender results looks like this for the monkey heads we've removed several of these 7,000 and 9,000 h EDT parts since they're basically the same as that's 10 series HDD t parts for the most part and the chart was getting too cluttered anyway the 9 out her K is well positioned here relative to past and present CPUs but we'd argue that the 8700 and the i7 2600k remain the two best value CPUs on this chart from this series of course we're talking respective to the time that they came out the 8700 K was a real kick to the teeth for Andy's new risin 7 1700 and put Intel back in a competitive position but that time was short-lived as Intel pushed the cpu out before supply was even ready before boards were even ready and then had nothing left to work with the 99er k was its next big move but that also moved to the price and it'll significantly higher than the rest of the stack something which the newly announced 10 series dt parts are correcting the i5 lineup at least impressed in one way previously the 4690k brought nearly 2,600 K performance except to add a price reduction to $240 that was a meaningful change and the 4690k was one of the best gaming parts at the time as well it was a huge leap about 18.5% from the 35 70 K previously here even the 35 70 K improved over the 2500 K by 12% on its own let's move on to another application 7 said compression and decompression our next starting with the latter the decompression results show limited generational gains in some instances like the seven and a half percent jump from the 2500 K to the 35 70 K but there's an overall 119 percent increase from the 2500 case stock to 9600 case stock CPUs some results are less impressive like the fact that it took intel for numerical generations not the same as actual generations to get the i7 2670 and i5 6600 k part the i7 6700k though gained about 44 percent over the 2600 k in that same time for i7 cpu is the 9700 k to 2600 k void is a 141 percent increase with the overclock producing some extra value at the top and this is an interesting chart where generationally the differences are sometimes small from one to the next the 6700 K to 7700 K in this instance or the 2600 k OC nearly equal in the 6700 K 5 years later as IPC increases and core count ticks up we can see the gap wide and Intel needs to keep this trend into the 10 series of desktop CPUs in to get an advancement into the double digits and they might do it with the core account to increase at similar prices to nine serious CPUs so the 3700 X is great perspective for Intel's positioning as as the 3600 a $200 part that outperforms most of Intel's lineup for compression the story is similar the 2500 km 9600 K improvement is 117 percent while the 2600 K it some 9700 K improvement is 129 percent the 9900 K increases the ceiling but it also increased the price it's the 10 series where we should see another meaningful jump in all these charts at hopefully lower prices closer to the original cost of the chips this last chart doesn't follow our theme Foley it's only six years of Intel CPUs so we apologize for that but it's still a good representation we're looking at Adobe from your render time for a 1080p 60hz 264 video this is for all the CPUs that are relevant here the 4690k finishes the render and nine and a half minutes while the 6600 K gets a market 13% render time reduction keep in mind that the 5775 see as an imaginary CPU that no one could buy so the 6600 K is basically the actual generational step the 7600 K improved 7% which brought it to 4790k stock performance from a few years prior on this chart we're seeing a bigger impact from threads than we might have in years past a change that adobe made in recent versions we see diminishing returns though with the 9900 K but just to show that the performance is not artificially limited we've added the 10 980 accion this chart to show us the real seal inner floor if you prefer a performance while the 31 35 X shows us that thread increases eventually fall off a few AMD parts are also scattered for perspective if you want to pause it and look at those but our focus is on ten years of Intel not much changes on the 4k chart in the hierarchy there's a harder line drawn at thread increases between the 9900 K and 3950 X so this workload does torture the CPUs a bit harder but the hierarchy is nearly identical other than a few shifts looking back at all this data then it's always kind of eye-opening to see just how well Sandy Bridge scaled with overclocking we've read benchmarked Sandy Bridge annually for like three years now there's a reason for it a lot of people bought those CPUs and a lot of people really care about the numbers today because they're still good but either way the 10 series is going to be an important one to consider here Intel is probably almost certainly at this point going to stay at the top and gaming charts there becomes a difficulty for Intel where now the CPS are getting fast enough and there hasn't been a new GPU generation that you're starting to really have to try to create a CPU bound load in games to the point where it might not be as realistic anymore and we don't ever test 720p the only time we did that was maybe one article for early I GPS and apu is probably circa 2013 or something like that maybe 2012 but we always stick with at least 1080p baseline 1440p and for the most part a lot of games are obviously GPU bound so yes you can create a bottleneck but there's a reasonable level given Sandy Bridge is phenomenal positioning in the market it's hard to believe that Intel will start this decade with the same position that Sandy Bridge did if we look at AMD right now it seems like perhaps there are 3000 series parts or about where that was Rison one like the 1700 good part it wasn't really competitive head-to-head and gaming just yet it was one of those well it does well enough and if you want the threads for other tasks like production workloads then go for it but otherwise if you just want a game keep buying Intel at the top end that started changing when Intel's top end serious competitors got to four hundred and five hundred dollars so Rison 1000 is probably comparable to Nehalem and Rison two or three thousand might be the Sandy Bridge analog so whether Intel's 10 series can achieve the same level of status as Sandy Bridge that remains to be seen obviously we'll be testing that shortly and reviews coming up sometime in the future in May so keep an eye on that but that's your decade and review certainly if it hadn't been already known Intel had a very strong start to the decade it flatlined in the center with four thousand six thousand seven thousand five thousand doesn't really count until buried that with six thousand immediately that was the true successor in desktop but 5000 was very good for the things it was good at it's unfortunately got buried and then later on eight thousand nine thousand but particularly eight thousand Intel started to wake up again so now ten series is we're gonna see okay have they actually fully woken up where does Intel still need to hit some kind of silicon process advanced to get back into gear check back for all that subscribe for more as always you can get a straw document excess net to grab one of our large mod mats we've just restocked them we were out of stock for a long time due to a mix of human malware and other shipping logistics challenges surrounding that but they're back now so visit the store if you want to pick one up or go to patreon.com/scishow and axis it helps out there as well we'll see you all next time\n"