I still think there is a market for faster hardware, that gives unique experiences.
Intel have the finest engineering teams in the world, with competences out of this world, and they are working on improving IPC 2-10% with each generation.
What is the meaning of this nonsense?
What do we do our selves to promote faster hardware?
Several reviewers and especially Anand have this eye on IPC, and its excactly that focus that is hindering performance where it could really matter - > multicore the next few years then avx2/hsa/?? full throttle (like inf64 wrote).
All, and that includes us, got their eyes on this IPC. If we had moved that years ago, all that valuable competence could have focused more productively elsewhere. Its next to useless. Imagine what could have been invented for the PC if the competences had looked elsewhere.
The effect is a monopoly market that gives average consumers no benefit, and therefore they are going away fx. to mobile -> Arm. Typically Otellinie strategy, and we were dancing to his tune, but the long time eroding of the pc market was one effect. Otellini was a killer of all innovation, no wonder JHH called Intel a money machine.
After all the market reacts to this nonsense. And now Quallcomm have same market cap as Intel. No wonder.
You guys remember what adding a fpu to x86 meant for performance? OoO? Integrated memory controller? Accerated 2D or 3D? We have the tech and the programming today to give us the same huge jump, we just have to stop looking at that idiotic IPC. Its a mental prison.
You're being way too hard on Intel. One of the main reasons why there is very little increase in CPU performance each generation is because AMD has basically dropped the ball. Since Conroe, AMD hasn't really been able to compete with Intel, and as such, Intel feels no particular need for substantial performance gains as their incremental gains still give AMD a good beating.
Hopefully Steamroller will give a better showing.
The other reason of course, is that besides a few niche applications like video encoding and certain games (which relatively fewer people use), consumer apps don't really leverage the enormous processing power of these CPUs.
Most consumers use PCs primarily to check e-mails, face book, surf the web etc... You can do all of that on tablets, smartphones, laptops etc with the added advantage of being mobile.
That's precisely why the desktop market is drying up and Intel and AMD are both focusing the majority of their engineering resources in mobile computing.
At any rate I'm suspicious of these benchmarks. Like others have pointed out, the hardware they used is likely not final and still has a few performance bugs to iron out.
Also, the main performance boost (AVX2) for Haswell will take time to materialize. When it does, we should be seeing very large performance gains.