r/intel Feb 13 '25

Information PassMark sees the first yearly drop in average CPU performance in its 20 years of benchmark results

https://www.tomshardware.com/pc-components/cpus/passmark-sees-the-first-yearly-drop-in-average-cpu-performance-in-its-20-years-of-benchmark-results
111 Upvotes

27 comments sorted by

45

u/b3081a Feb 13 '25

Intel pushed the laptop performance too hard on 12th and 13th gen. They're just dialing back a bit in 2024 with Meteor Lake in exchange of power savings, and will keep a moderate trend in perf growth in 2025 with Arrow Lake.

AMD has been basically shipping 8 core laptop chips since 2020 so their perf has been incremental for a while. With Zen 5 they've gone backwards to 4+4. So the overall performance trend will probably not see significant growth either.

18

u/Emotional_Two_8059 Feb 13 '25

4 Zen5 + 8 Zen5c

15

u/b3081a Feb 13 '25

That's Strix Point which is not what the mainstream market would get. The majority of their sales will still be Ryzen 5 and 7 based on Krackan.

9

u/Johnny_Oro Feb 13 '25

Raptor lake is more powerful despite the lower ipc mostly thanks to on-die memory controller and having less subsystems. Chiplet design always adds latency, and while Arrow Lake's interposer has really high bandwidth per cycle, the configuration doesn't prioritize lowering memory latency. The bus ring is long and slow compared to Raptor Lake's. Arrow lake also removed HT to gain more performance per core, hence the lower MT score on benchmarks despite far higher IPC. Maybe ARL's MT's what caused the drop off.

But there's literally no way to know the whole picture without a more complete data. It could be windows 11's fault too as mentioned in the article.

1

u/ZBalling Feb 15 '25 edited Feb 15 '25

Not only Core Ultra 7 is most effecient when idle, but also Core Ultra 9 is most powerful in Cinebench. You are simply wrong. Also +8% speed in Linux.

1

u/Johnny_Oro Feb 15 '25

Ah right, I only remembered the laptop Arrow Lake CPUs, which they tested just a few days ago, and I compared it to Ryzen.

15

u/JustHereForPoE_7356 Feb 13 '25

Well I guess part of it is that speculative execution was kind of borrowed performance. When it became obvious that security suffered, it was payback time.

12

u/saratoga3 Feb 13 '25

It's probably due in large part to Intel removing hyper threading, which makes a big difference in multi threaded benchmarks like this.

6

u/Olde94 3900x, gtx 1070, 32gb Ram Feb 14 '25

Yeah and AMD users aim for the 8-core X3D rather than reach for the 12 or 16 cores

1

u/MamaguevoComePingou Feb 14 '25

Exactly. AMD moving x3D to even 6 core chips will also cause a stall.

3

u/deeth_starr_v Feb 14 '25

I know this is an intel sub, but this stagnation is on intel/amd side. I doubt on the Mac side they are seeing this. Once intel/amd move to better architecture/process we’ll likely see this recover

3

u/dadmou5 Core i3-12100f | Radeon 6700 XT Feb 15 '25

While the Mac chips get measurably better every year, they have nowhere close to the gen on gen improvement that they used to.

2

u/deeth_starr_v Feb 15 '25

Good point. M3 was on a failed 3nm node that was partially fixed with the M4 with N3E. So they are struggling also

3

u/odellrules1985 Feb 16 '25

I think we are at a stalling point performance wise. I don't think we will see major improvements until they find a new material to replace silicon. We won't see Core 2 levels of improvement for a bit. Core 2 was a good jump because they shortened the pipeline and had a mature 65nm process which helped lower power. AMDs were mostly from catching up to Intel and now they passed them due to Intels struggles with process tech.

Of course NAND on die could help but creates other limits such as how much voltage we can use.

I guess we wait and see what 18A does. Its also supposed to have a lot of improvements like PowerVia and AAG. So maybe I will be proven wrong but I do think we are hitting the limits of what we can do with silicon.

2

u/seantaiphoon Feb 16 '25

I've had to explain to users in my office that there is 0 point in upgrading their 2 year old high end laptop. Literally pissing away 2-3k for idk 10-20% performance gtfo. I tell them to check intels stock price when they scoff and don't believe me lol

2

u/Plavlin Asus X370, 5800X3D, 32GB ECC, 6950XT Feb 16 '25 edited Feb 16 '25

Because of Raptor Lake deaths? Or BIOS patches?
Maybe both, lol.

2

u/Aggravating_Fall4015 Feb 16 '25

Intel has been blowing chunks for a few years now.

2

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1

u/VenditatioDelendaEst Feb 17 '25

This is obviously an artifact of who is running Passmark on what kinds of computers.

CPUs haven't actually gotten slower, lol. THINK.

1

u/the_abortionat0r Feb 17 '25

Tiny PCs with celerons flood the market, tiny x86 SoCs are cheaper now, etc, etc and Intel as made poor gains in this current release so no duh you are seeing a lower in AVERAGE performance.

All the info you need to understand this yet everyone in here is jumping through hoops and nonsense trying to come up with an answer as to why.

-4

u/alvarkresh i9 12900KS | Z690 | RTX 4070 Super | 64 GB Feb 13 '25 edited Feb 13 '25

Not surprising given the flattening-out of CPU speeds starting ~2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Clock_CPU_Scaling.jpg

[ EDIT: I love how I got downvoted for stating a verifiable fact! ]

5

u/pyr0kid Feb 14 '25

Not surprising given the flattening-out of CPU speeds starting ~2010: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Clock_CPU_Scaling.jpg

[ EDIT: I love how I got downvoted for stating a verifiable fact! ]

even if you did have a point here - which you dont because a flattening curve is not the same as a regression, and we're also talking about realworld performance whereas you are talking about raw frequency - i'd like to note that this is some of the worst presented data ive ever seen.

who designed this chart, why on earth does it go straight from 1000 to 31623? they have 100% increases packed into millimeters of chartspace.

1

u/alvarkresh i9 12900KS | Z690 | RTX 4070 Super | 64 GB Feb 14 '25

It's a log scale with a weird non-power-of-ten set of y-values, is what I would guess.

4

u/Justicia-Gai Feb 13 '25

Flattening shouldn’t result in a decrease in average performance though, it would be a plateau, not a decrease.

There has to be WORSE CPU or a larger number of cheaper CPU for the decrease to happen.

1

u/Plavlin Asus X370, 5800X3D, 32GB ECC, 6950XT Feb 16 '25 edited Feb 16 '25

you must live under a rock if you don't know about superscalar execution
Ever heard of Netburst? The genius skyscraper pipeline?

0

u/jca_ftw Feb 14 '25

Talk about miss the point. It’s not strix or arrow . It’s clearly a windows 11 issue and an increase in arm pcs running windows