CPU trends

 In the CPU benchmark post lots of steps have been shown, but some additional data had to be added as the original data source was a bit outdated. Yes, if you start a business, then ... we could not stop at the most wanted plots.

Check and supplement database

First, about the missing entries of recently made CPUs on the market I made a search for better databases and as I have mentioned the one from NoteBookcheck.net was useful. Inmediately verified some of the selected CPUs in competetion for the first place and found matching data. At the same time I started to hunt for outliers, like the one labeled with arrow:

This was found to be a real outlier, so no data error have been found, it is just simply a CPU bad in X264 pass 1 benchmark (video conversion).

Then I found a data conversion error on the original data source site, among the data of the power consumption:

A few of AMD CPUs had this extremely high power consumption value which of course is a result of wrong data conversion extraction from some original source, which was checked on NooteBookCheck.net:

Oh, yes, the hyphen. For sure this was misinterpreted by Excel and noone verified the data put on the website. Note: the higher numbers were taken as power values as the best performance data is shown in the other columns which for sure were reached by the highest power consumption state... anyhow it does not count, except if you make a scatter plot like this:

Page 2 on the CPU benchmark Data Analysis dashboard

 

A secondary consideration was to select a CPU with low consumption (to stay green, but rather to have long up-time on batteries), which at the end was met with the Ryzen 5 4700U (15W). 

But back to the check-and-fix steps. To have the top CPUs also in the list not to be mislead by old data and to know the real quality of the selected CPUs in the contest for the first place in our decision making process I have involved some CPUs with the highest 3DMark benchmark result. To match the data of the our original data source and the NoteBookCheck.net data clearing, conversion and extraction was made by a Google sheet (using some automatized cell function, see in the image):

Of course, Excel would have been good as well for this task, on the other hand, any scripting (language) would have been superfluous.

Helpful colors ...

The basic scatter plot is not easy to read, especially as the results are plotted versus CPU ID (list number) here ...

... thus I tried to differentiate the two companies, AMD and Intel...

and then chose to use processor types to color the bubbles. Color coding if all CPU are present is still not enough, but if you select some subset then it turns to be useful. See interactively on my Google Data CPU benchmark dashboard (page 2).

This Type based coloring was chosen for almost all the other panels, as well.

CPU trends

... finally, about such things which are widely known, but with some twist:

Already mentioned above, and widely known that higher computational speed requires and results in  higher power consumption (TDP). Here again the ratio of 3DMark result / Cinebench Multithreading plotted versus power consumed. It is visible that there are strict values for the CPU power consumptions and if you chose one value then there are CPUs widely spread vertically, which of course means that the relation is not linear, rather there are other factors which determine the final benchmark results. We can also state that in this ratio versus power plot there is no specific relation between these factors so low power CPUs can be as good as highly consuming ones. Check that outlier at 100 W, with an average ratio value!

Similarly, the number of cores in the processor results in a widely spread benchmark (here 3D Mark) values if you chose one value (e.g. 4), so here again, not the core number is the ultimate parameter that determines the result. The increasing tendence of performance by core number is clear (in all other benchmarks as well, so those are not shown) so people are waiting for 10-12-16 core CPUs... wait! Could it increase infinitely? Not all properties can be increased without reaching a limit defined by nature or technical implementation:

So if you follow the bending curve of benchmark results by increasig L3 cache size, then a limit around 32 MB is already visible, which is also a limit of profit for the producers, but don not be afraid, first because the L3 cahce is not the most important part regarding the performance, secondly, they will, for sure, figure out something to follow Moore's law.

It is the Cinebench Multithreading benchmark which (still) shows a linear tendency, saying that in conversion of videos L3 cahce size can be relevant and will not be a limiting factor for a while. Good news for the video content editors and creators.

There is always a competition of overclocking the CPUs until those get almost burnt down just to prove that my CPU can perform better than it is said in the datasheet. So here there are some plots of minimum and maximum (turbo) frequency related benchmark results (similar for all type of benchmarks).

This is shown mainly because this looks great... and on the other hand here you can see the trends clearly.

For sure, PC- / laptop- lovers will be satisfied with the trends in the future and in spite of te fact that technology is again getting close to a new barrier, but I remember ~10 years ago the situation was the same and ... clever engineers solved the limitation of wire size of the era.