Stagnant? Nah. PCs are improving faster than you thought

More cores, more power

Maximum PC recently pitted the performance of Bloomfield, a consumer architecture from 2008, against a brand new rig running the latest Core i7-6700K processor. While the new chip was up to twice as quick, the gain was, in some tests, surprisingly small. PCMark’s home and creative benchmarks, for example, actually came out in favor of the Bloomfield-based system.
The results are interesting, and make sense from a certain perspective. The i7-965 used by Maximum PC is a close approximation to the Core i7-6700K in terms of specification. It has four cores, eight processing threads, and its clock speed of 3.2GHz is about as close as chips from that era come to the 4GHz 6700K.

But, in another respect, the comparison isn’t quite right. The i7-965 was the absolute cutting-edge at the time it was released, and it was priced at $999 (Kshs.100,000). Skylake’s Core i7, on the other hand, is only $350 (Kshs35,000). A more proper comparison is Intel’s Core i7-5960X, an eight-core, sixteen-thread monstrosity with a maximum Turbo clock of 3.5GHz. It currently sells for $1,049 (Kshs.105,900).
And that chip blows the doors off anything that doesn’t have Xeon (Intel’s brand of server-centric chips). In our own tests it’s as much as 80 percent quicker than the i7-6700K, but The Tech Report’s huge library of legacy results do an even better job of demonstrating the 5960X’s speed. In any multi-core test – and modern, demanding programs are indeed designed for multiple cores – the chip is wondrously quick.