That's my point. Without competition, Intel is just competing with itself and it causes stagnation. They can release 5% iterations endlessly and steadily creep up the price. Intel's focus has been mobiles & notebooks for so long because nothing challenges them on desktops.
Without AMD GPUs to force NV to excel & innovate, what is stopping them from doing a similar stunt as Intel has been doing for the past few generations? Nada.
So your saying that intel has been perfectly capable of producing chips with much higher gains but just didn't because of their monopoly? That's a really bold conclusion.
I am not getting into what nvidia might or might not do with a monopoly but I just think it is naive to say that intel is just holding back due to the lack of AMD competition.
There are so many other possibilities and indications of such. It seems pretty clear to me that intel has run up to a wall and is trying to climb over it rather than leap. Just because your a chip maker, it doesnt mean you are in complete control. Not hardly. Just look at netburst: prescott, the P4, pentium D. Very talented and capable engineers made decisions that turned out to be completely the wrong way to go. But, they really really believed this was the path future. Don't be so naive, this is all uncharted territory. Look at the original phenom or bulldozer. These were thought up by brilliant minds. But it turns out that building a completely new and better x86 architecture isn't so easy at all. Intel had to turn to backwards to scramble out the core 2 duo. It was built up from the core/pentium M which goes back to the pentium 3.
But from turning back they were able to move forward. You may know well about the back pedal that gave us the core2. But do you realize that Nehalem was a direct descendant in the evolved lineage. Intel brought in two important changes, hyper threading (which they were already implementing in the P4) and they finally got their own on chip memory controller (which was an AMD concept). From there on, sandy, ivy and haswell are all fundamentally based off the same old core technology. Its minor evolution from the architectural standpoint. Intel was heavily invested in fabrication process carrying them into the future. As a matter of fact, their plan on moving forward since the core 2 was tick rock. But this formula has hit a major snag.
If you really look at what has been happening, its clear that the node shrinks are not bringing the future that everyone thought. This is not an intel issue, it is industry wide. Intel is actually working thru the quicksand where other fabs have completely cancelled multibillion dollar nodes. But I just look at the products and you can see there is a clear issue. Focusing on intel alone, they hit a wall. Their last impressive new node was 32nm. It had a large drop in power consumption and really moved the bar in max clocks. As a matter of fact, 22nm not only failed to move the bar on max clocks, it actually seems to have dropped the ceiling. When it comes to what your average overclocker should expect, the bar did drop. Its clear that intel's 22nm node failed to move the max clocks, it is not even debatable. But now we have broadwell to examine. It is basically a shrink of haswell, and after so so much of a delay............its looking like the upper tier products won't be making it at all. Do you really think this is because of no competition from AMD? It is the node. Their 14nm is even worse than the 22nm results. Its a real issue and one that I find extremely scary.
If you look at real world power consumption, the upper tier intel 22nn chips use about as much power as their 32nm chips did. Not a lot of difference, especially when overclocked. Combine that with the fact that haswell cannot catch sandy when it comes to realistic user overclocks, it is a disaster. This node wasnt able to move enthusiast further. Its just clear as day. Then we have 14nm, currently it is looking like an even worse outcome.
You cannot say this is all the result of a lack in effort. The improvements we do have are because of improvements to the architecture. But with a tick tock path, intel is driving forward in a car on two flats. It is just a terrible situation. Intel has dumped billions and billions into advancing their world class nodes. This was part of their path forward. The snag is so real, now we see tsmc dumping their 20nm HP. It is a real problem that everyone will struggle with.
Intel is now fully dependent on the architecture to bring them higher. And if you look back throughout the history of chips, big changes there rarely happen. They are few and far between. Node shrinks played a major role in moving us forward in CPU performance. But clearly, things have hit a major snag.
It sucks, sucks bad. But saying that intel CPUs haven't advanced in top performance is a result of a monopoly.....that is like blaming AMD. There is clearly something much bigger going on. And now we are seeing it happen with gpus. And of course, I expect people to blame that on AMD too. That is just crazy.
I think, I hope , gpus aren't as hard to move forward as x86. What I mean is, i hope we can still get major architectural changes. Intel is promising that with skylake. But I really wouldn't bet on a major shift up in top performance. Looking back, it seems that these major shifts are extremely rare.
Its just time to face the facts. We have really hit a snag and its gonna take a major shift in new technology for us to see the huge jumps in performance everyone wants to see. Its not AMD or the lack of their competition. Its just the bleak truth