Hopefully these benchmarks debunk the idea and preconceptions, particularly here on this forum, that you need the most latest NUC with the most powerful processor to run Roon Core using ROCK.
The Intel core CPU architecture, has probably not changed dramatically in the last 5 years, since the introduction of 14nm processes. From reading the notes on the different processor generations it looks they have worked on GPU performance to support the requirements of 4K & higher resolutions, higher RAM addressing and integrating WiFi & Bluetooth to ‘on chip’ processing.
Plus introductions fixes for the Security vulnerabilities discovered, with hardware fixes over initial BIOS updates.
It is only in the Cannon Lake, Whiskey Lake & Ice Lake series have Intel been trying to release on a shrunk 10nm die, but that hasn’t gone that well, with many of these being back on 14nm production, including the forthcoming Comet Lake, 10th Generation.
Plus I don’t believe these were released in NUC devices or supported by ROCK.
Of course, as a headless server you don’t need any of the display capabilities, GPU performance, graphics rendering, etc.
ROCK only uses wired networking so no WiFi or Bluetooth usage.
Plus we have seen that ROCK only needs 8GB for OS & DB, until the library is that massive that it starts crashing.
A music server will sit in a network behind a NAT unit and Firewall (whether discrete or the ISP’s provided router, but these are normally very low quality implementations & add huge network bottlenecks) so the hardware fixes to the Meltdown and Spectre vulnerabilities are not required.
So I would say, most of the later NUC generations have offered no significant improvement to ROCK performance (certainly not enough to warrant additional spend) and the additional performance of an i5 or i7 processor, at the higher processing speeds are unnecessary for the required application in the audio processing algorithms employed in the RoonOS. There is just extra heat to deal with, which is undesired in a music server environment, as it needs to be cooled which introduces additional electrical noise.
But a good exercise to undertake.
Simon