An Important Announcement (March 31, 2017)

Back in January, I had made an announcement that CPU Grade would receive a well-deserved update by today, March 31, 2017. While I had hoped that this three-month period would have provided ample time to fully implement everything I had planned, that, attributed to occurrences in my personal life, unfortunately doesn't seem to be the case.

The CPU Grade project is the work of a single individual. Almost 14,000 hours of dedication has been put into the project over the past three years, and, during that time, the processor database has been entirely reworked, twice, while the grading system has been completely redone, three times. The majority of this work has been behind the scenes in the back-end which houses the foundations from which the entire website operates. As a visitor, you may or may not have been aware of these changes, as most front-end updates thus far have focused on aesthetics, with a few functionality updates sprinkled in-between.

So, what does all of this mean for the project's future? In short, nothing bad. The project will not be shut down so please don't worry about that. In fact, I would like to take this opportunity to mention that a lot of work is being done as we speak. However, as I was unable to meet the end of March deadline, I am going to eliminate the usage of any hard deadlines in the future and instead continue working towards smaller, incremental updates that will lead up to the summer of 2017.

As a heads-up to what's coming, there's an incredible amount of back-end work that's currently the main focus. This will provide the basis for all future specification and grade entries into the database. In addition to this, the entire website's SEO is being reworked to improve search engine result performance, and the grading system will also be receiving a couple more improvements; performance and raw compute grades will now be split into single-thread and multi-thread metrics, and raw compute grades will now utilize single-precision performance, instead of double-precision.

The grading system improvements are ready, but the SEO is still underway. The aim over the next three to four months, is to expand the database to be larger than it has ever been before. Lastly, I want to mention that search and comparison features will be implemented in the future, and the website will offer visitors methods to download and/or print specifications directly from the page. (This is a hint that a printer-friendly layout is also under development.)

Suffice to say, I am sad that the initial deadline was unable to be reached, but with no such deadlines in place any longer, the project's development cycle will feel much more natural and free-flowing.

The order in which microprocessors will be added to the database remains unchanged, so expect to see AMD's Ryzen and Intel's Skylake-X and Kaby Lake-X processors at the top of the list. Desktop and laptop chips retain top priority, while embedded, server, and smartphone/tablet platforms keep their secondary and tertiary priorities.

Thank you for sticking with me over the past three years. Today marks a new chapter in the CPU Grade project's history. Here's to the future.

— Dylan