Kind of a dumb question but I’m genuinely curious: is this a worthwhile upgrade? I run a server with a single vm and a few dozen docker containers. I’m intrigued by performance and efficiency cores and whether there would be a noticeable effect on both energy efficiency and performance vs the 12th gen. I’ve looked at the cpu benchmark comparison and see the numbers and there looks like a big increase in performance with little downside other than the cost of doing it. Any input is appreciated.
I’m always look at ongoing costs rather than upfront and mostly thats the TDP, which is exactly the same. So I would agree with your sentiment. The major cost is performing it.
Single thread has a small increase 5% or so, but you have double the amount of threads. So your two dozen (24) docker containers could have a thread per container! Thid could benefit you a lot if you were running anywhere near 100% or have long running multithread jobs.
If I had the disposable money and I thought I could sell the 12th gen CPU then maybe. But i’m still rocking some old E3-12xx v3 Xeons which probably costs me more per year than what you will pay to upgrade!
How performant are the efficiency cores and does Linux/docker make good use of them? I’m skeptical of the new variant of performance/efficiency core make up. 24 cores is great, but aren’t most of them the equivalent to an intel Atom?
Good point. Most of the info I see related to unraid and 13th gen is “it works fine” but would love more details. I am also very curious about unraid being able to make use of p vs e cores. Thanks for the input!
I went from an i5-7600K to an i5-13600K and the performance improvement has been worth every penny. Obviously a bit of a different upgrade than what you asked so it’s hard for me to say if it’s worth it in your case.
That being said the significant upgrade in core count has helped a ton, I usually have around 30 docker containers running and haven’t had any performance issues, previously my whole server would lock up when any docker ran an intensive process unless I pinned cores for unraid itself. Ive also seen a huge improvement with transcoding due to the improved iGPU but I think that was the same one in the 12th gen so you probably wouldn’t see value there.
I appreciate the info! My 12500 has been great to be honest but 13th gen just seems like such a performance jump with the same power draw. The Intel UHD 770 is a beast of an iGPU. I’ve had it for a couple years now and I am still blown away by the efficiency and quality compared to the P1000 that I had before.
Bah! I totally forgot that they have the new “efficiency” cores…
Hmmm, I’d still say its totally worth it because the 12500 only has 6 core (12 threads) total. You are getting 8 extra core/threads.
Linux/docker/anyOS will make use of 8 extra cores regardless of the workload. Sure they might not be as performent on the lower end but a process running 12 threads vs a process running 20 threads will always be more performant.
The extra cores do sound sweet huh? I’m gonna set up a price watch. Will report back if I do it.
Thank you for the reply! I am probably in the same boat as you when it comes to tangible energy/cost savings but was curious. Maybe if I can catch a deal and get a decent amount for my existing CPU, I’ll pull the trigger