What are the newer Intel CPUs bringing to the table?

My primary machine is a desktop--named "Matrix"--that is pretty powerfully packed, but it's running an aging i7-4790 CPU @ 3.6 GHz, four cores (8 hyperthreads). It's not overclockable, but I don't intend to overclock my primary work machine.

Although it's an aging chip, do newer i7 4-core chips really bring enough to the table for Photoshop and Premiere Pro (I do not game) to be worth upgrading the motherboard as well?

Or should I wait for i9 10-core chips to come down in price?

Most of Intel's gains in the last few years have been in the area of power consumption, not performance. I'm still running an i7-2600 and when I last looked into upgrading, doubling the CPU performance would have been very expensive. Forget getting any meaningful jump in performance without replacing the motherboard too. Sadly, there's too few of us who want fast computers any more. Everyone wants a Facebook machine that lasts all day on battery.

It's not like they are bringing best speeds anyways or maybe they can't, they need a new completely new architecture not just a little boost from the past ones.

the difference between the 6th and 7th generation is almost none, but they sure did make tons of money fooling everyone it would be a huge jump/boost. I think they do that with every two generations though not sure.

You probably wouldn't see any difference with Photoshop. For video encoding with Adobe software, you can get noticeable speed improvements from a video card upgrade. Adobe seems to have partnered with Nvidia to have full cuda support...its OpenGL hardware acceleration fully utilizes the GPU's cores. For a desktop workstation, I look at multiprocessor/multico​re Xeons for 3D rendering (which seems to side more with processor cores) vs video rendering with Adobe AfterEffects/Premiere (which I've noticed has noticeable speed differences based on GPU).

Heya,

Realistically, not much has changed in a few years. Just tightening up efficiency and increasing thread counts. Photoshop will not be any different. Photoshop really still mostly functions from a single core for most of what it does and really bottoms out in gains with 4 cores, which it barely utilizes completely, it's still just not a multi-threaded software suite yet. Premiere could potentially show gains with more threads, but really, with video encoding a good GPU with Cuda does a faster job in a lot of cases if you're not looking to change out your entire system and spend $600+ doing it.

Very best,

mike_d wrote in post #18395882
Most of Intel's gains in the last few years have been in the area of power consumption, not performance. I'm still running an i7-2600 and when I last looked into upgrading, doubling the CPU performance would have been very expensive. Forget getting any meaningful jump in performance without replacing the motherboard too. Sadly, there's too few of us who want fast computers any more. Everyone wants a Facebook machine that lasts all day on battery.

Ditto, 2600K. Newer CPUs don't have much in the way of gains, at least according to benchmarks. If I had a high MP camera and was processing thousands of files at a time, maybe, but the 2600K is a trouper that I'll stay with for a while yet.

That's about what I figured. I'm running an Nvidia card with 4 gigs of video ram and 256-bit band width--Premier Pro won't do anything more with anything better.

But as I suspected, small increments in CPU speed won't do much.

I'll have to wait for both i9 10-core processors to come down in price...and for Premier Pro to start using that many cores.

If you're still just looking at 4 core/8 thread parts, they've gotten marginally better, but not much. The newer chips have a few percent gains here or there at the same clock speed. The biggest part of any performance boost would be buying one of the newer chips that runs at a higher clock speed.

I'm running an i7-3770K. Normally after 5-6 years I'd be looking at an upgrade but the upgrade I want doesn't really seem to have materialized. I was hoping to move to a 6 or 8 core chip (with HT/SMT) while getting a significant per-core performance gain. The reality is it's still a tradeoff. Per core performance in some respects drops off (clock speed for instance is often dropped and boost speeds are limited) as you move to the higher core counts, although that seems to be lessening.

Maybe things will be different in another generation or two, so far I'm not seeing many compelling reasons to upgrade yet.

Maybe consider getting an older higher end chip for your current motherboard, but even that won't gain you a whole lot, especially for photo editing.

That said, I recently bought an i7 3960x for $70 on eBay for my X79 board. Pretty crazy when you consider that CPU was selling for $1000 a few years ago and isn't far off from the current 6 core CPUS.

EverydayGetaway wrote in post #18397826
Maybe consider getting an older higher end chip for your current motherboard, but even that won't gain you a whole lot, especially for photo editing.

That said, I recently bought an i7 3960x for $70 on eBay for my X79 board. Pretty crazy when you consider that CPU was selling for $1000 a few years ago and isn't far off from the current 6 core CPUS.

I was just checking to make sure I wasn't overlooking something in i7 chips. The consensus seems to be that I'm not.

RDKirk wrote in post #18397849
I was just checking to make sure I wasn't overlooking something in i7 chips. The consensus seems to be that I'm not.

Nope. Not at all. It looks like Intel may finally move the needle and bring a 6 core hyperthreaded part in to the i7 line in the next 18 months but I'm not 100% clear on what they're planning with Coffee Lake or Cannon Lake.

Until Adobe does a ground up rebuild of Photoshop/Lightroom to take full advantage of multiple cores, processor instruction sets and GPU acceleration you are not going to see much in the lines of performance boost, the software is becoming the bottleneck.

Colorblinded wrote in post #18397856
Nope. Not at all. It looks like Intel may finally move the needle and bring a 6 core hyperthreaded part in to the i7 line in the next 18 months but I'm not 100% clear on what they're planning with Coffee Lake or Cannon Lake.

They already have hyperthreaded 6 core CPUs in the i7 line, did you mean i5 lineup? That seems like the next logical move for them if they want to compete with AMD Ryzen, but given their latest i9 who knows what they're planning, enough people are still under the now dated belief that AMD < Intel so they'll likely keep overcharging for incremental updates.

EverydayGetaway wrote in post #18398206
They already have hyperthreaded 6 core CPUs in the i7 line, did you mean i5 lineup? That seems like the next logical move for them if they want to compete with AMD Ryzen, but given their latest i9 who knows what they're planning, enough people are still under the now dated belief that AMD < Intel so they'll likely keep overcharging for incremental updates.

I should have specified in the consumer or standard i7 lineup. As far as I'm aware that's only available in the HEDT X line. If you want it, there are certain features they have like more PCI lanes, quad channel memory, etc, but they also cost quite a bit more.

https://www.cpubenchma​rk.net …+Core+i7-4790+%40+3.60GHz

The difference is probably less than 20% between your non overclockable i7 and the latest Kabylake 7700K
If you really want a cpu with more than 4 cores then I'd recommend you to get the AMD Ryzen 1800x
or if you really want to stay with Intel then probably i7 6800K with 6 cores and HT but in both cases you will need new motherboard and RAM.

about the i9
https://www.youtube.co​m/watch?v=TWFzWRoVNnE