On 2/12/2016 6:38 AM, jr wrote:
> hi,
>
> On 11/02/2016 14:00, dick balaska wrote:
>> Or you could get yourself a computer with a modern FPU.  Celeron was
>> designed to be "cheap" and they did that by having a weak FPU and no
>> cache.
>
> my elderly Celeron-based system needs replacing soon, which CPU would
> you (and other readers) recommend?
>
i5's are "cheap".  $500 for a decent system.  That will give you 4 cores.
I just priced an i7 box for just under $1000. The i7's are all "double 
threaded" which means 2 instructions at a time can be processed.  So in 
a 4 core CPU you get a virtual 8 cores.
My (4) core i7 box averages [1] twice as fast as my (4) core i5(s).
( http://www.buckosoft.com/bsac/ or
   http://www.buckosoft.com/bsac/meta/ )

If you do a lot of POV-Ray and can afford it, get a 6 core i7 or even 
the 8 core i7.

Intel's new number system sucks and you can't know your players without 
a scorecard.  I use this one.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Core

The only thing being an i7 means is it is double threaded.  There is 
still a *huge* variance between different models of i7. You could get 
between 2 and 8 cores. So make sure you check the model number of the 
chip!  BestBuy advertises boxes with "latest generation Intel(R)(C) i7 
technology!"  This is not enough information to make an informed decision.

You can google "i7-4960x vs i7-4930k" and cpuboss.com will give you 
graphs comparing the two chips.

If you can afford to be top dog, then you want the i7-5960X.

dik

[1] I have scenes where the i7 is only 20% faster than the i5. I have 
other scenes where the i7 is 10x faster(!) than the i5. (I don't know if 
that is a Windows (i7) vs. Linux (i5) issue.)

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