Intel Celeron G3930 On Linux: A Dual-Core Kabylake CPU For $40

[DanL]

No, it was an intelligent rebuttal to a stupid comment with excellent performance and a $40 pricetag is somehow worthless.

Fair enough, but the correct answer is because there's demand for them and Intel can make money. It has nothing to do with AMD or RyZen, so even bringing that flamebait up on this topic is not what I'd call intelligent.

[Delgarde]

Huh? Guess you haven't seen the leaked Zen benchmarks showing it beating intel's $1000 top of the range i7 chips. Or AMD's official statement saying they've achieved 40%+ IPC improvement with Zen. Zen is a completely different design, SMT vs. CMT. Using the poor single-thread performance of the old CMT architecture to gauge Zen performance is silly.

No, but they've been badly lagging Intel on performance for so many years now... they compete well on value for money, but not at all well on actual value (and I'm speaking as someone running a two-year-old A10 chip).

And yes, Zen is supposed to be great, leaked benchmarks and all... but it's still in the future, not on shelves now.

[VikingGe]

I saw a review of one of the current "high end" AMD chips recently

The "current" AMD lineup is five years old, with an architecture that already wasn't exactly a great performer when it debuted.

Though I too find it rather sad that these 30€ chips with two cores and limited feature set are like twice as fast as my overclocked six-core Phenom in pretty much everything escept the timed compilation benchmarks nowadays, but such is life, that thing is almost 7 years old.

[Ray54]

It is great to see mainstream processors, like the G4600 being tested on Linux. I have 2 over-clocked G3258 Pentiums, a Sandy Bridge i3 and a regular Sandy Bridge Pentium all with Nvidia mid-range graphics cards in my house, for medium-level gaming. However, I don't have a clue about an upgrade path for my PCs, as new Intel quad cores are currently stupidly expensive. I am hoping that basic AMD Ryzen quad cores will be around $100 and hence affordable, if not I may be looking at the G4600. Does anybody know the performance impact of using a G4600 with my old1600Mhz DDR3 compared with new DDR4?

Regarding Celerons, I purchased an equivalent Sandy Bridge Celeron a few years ago for a media PC, but when a family member's PC failed, it got used as a regular PC. It has been plenty fast enough for normal PC use (i.e. non-gaming and non-video editing applications). So yes, Celerons have their usefulness with Linux.

[torsionbar28]

I have always wondered why Intel produces so many different processors, particularly these worthless underperformers.
Why not just focus on a line of processors that performs well? When the price difference between an underperformer
and one that is adequate is very little why would anyone want something that is impractical.

Uh, because there's a market for them? Kind of a silly question, no? Not everyone is as affluent as you are, plenty of folks in the world would like a new PC and a $40 CPU allows system builders to produce the kind of low cost machines they can afford. Not to mention bland business desktop peecees where Word and Excel are the most demanding apps, a $40 CPU is more than enough, and results in real cost savings when the business is replacing thousands of desktops all at once.

[torsionbar28]

Sadly, yes. I saw a review of one of the current "high end" AMD chips recently, and while the reviewer tried to put a spin on it in terms of unbeatable price, the fact remains that the benchmarks showed it struggling to compete with the Intel i3 range, much less the i5 or i7. *Maybe* Zen will turn that around... but I'm not putting money on it.

Huh? Guess you haven't seen the leaked Zen benchmarks showing it beating intel's $1000 top of the range i7 chips. Or AMD's official statement saying they've achieved 40%+ IPC improvement with Zen. Zen is a completely different design, SMT vs. CMT. Using the poor single-thread performance of the old CMT architecture to gauge Zen performance is silly.

As for "not putting money on it", it's your own loss. I bought thousands of shares of AMD stock at $1.88 at this time last year. It's over $12 today. I did put money on it, and I've made some serious profits!! Capitalism FTW; the ultimate democratization of wealth.

[drake23]

Rather than comparing these low end processors with other recent higher end processors your should compare them with core 2 duo/quad, initial core i cpus and other older parts, since these cheap cpus make more sense for folks running older systems that have been delaying their upgrades for a long time.

I'd second that Or maybe a comparison with, say, the athlon 5350 (at least graphics wise, I know the cpu part of kaby probably wipes the floor with kabini) or a core 2 quad perhaps...

[chuckula]

What are you talking about? Was this a serious remark or just another lame attempt at being an Intel fanboy thinly-veiled with "humor"?

No, it was an intelligent rebuttal to a stupid comment with excellent performance and a $40 pricetag is somehow worthless. As for RyZen, it's been met with unthinking acclaim as being so great when all the leaks point to an 8 core part in 2017 being clearly below the level of an 8 core Intel part that was insulted as being worthless when it debuted in 2014.

[DanL]

I always wonder why Michael benchmarks those Celeron and Pentium processors without overclocking them.

OC'ing doesn't seem to be Michael's focus. Maybe next year, Intel will put out a 20th Anniversary Celeron with unlocked multiplier.

You know what this celeron would be called if it were an AMD part? The RyZen 2018 dual-core model.

What are you talking about? Was this a serious remark or just another lame attempt at being an Intel fanboy thinly-veiled with "humor"?

[Delgarde]

You know what this celeron would be called if it were an AMD part? The RyZen 2018 dual-core model.

Sadly, yes. I saw a review of one of the current "high end" AMD chips recently, and while the reviewer tried to put a spin on it in terms of unbeatable price, the fact remains that the benchmarks showed it struggling to compete with the Intel i3 range, much less the i5 or i7. *Maybe* Zen will turn that around... but I'm not putting money on it.