Welcome to the dark ages

[SickBeast]

I hope you all like your current CPUs.

With a complete lack of competition at the high end, innovation is going to be stifled for at least 2-3 years.

The best AMD seems able to do is a 4.4ghz Phenom II.

It will be interesting to see what AMD does with an absolutely puny R&D budget going forward.

Intel can just bide its time at this point. They're really only competing with themselves at the high end.

You know what, though, ARM might catch up and release something at 3ghz relatively quickly.

 

[sangyup81]

Funny, Phenom didn't make Intel stop innovation. Prices are another matter of course

 

[Chiropteran]

Not yet. Possibly soon, but not yet.

 

[swilli89]

It won't suspend forward progress but things might be different if AMD was more competitive. But I don't think we should draw parallels between decreasing improvements each generation and lack of competition.

Take video cards for example. Arguably, nV and AMD are equal in regards to performance, yet the 6900 series didn't improve on things as much as say, the HD5800 series over the HD4800, the X800XT over the 9800PRO, or even the Radeon 9700 over the Radeon 8000 series.

Lithography advancements are slowing down. I see a trend of improvements moving to a more linear model as opposed to the exponential Moore's law.

 

[Edrick]

With a complete lack of competition at the high end, innovation is going to be stifled for at least 2-3 years.

Yea, nothing really to get excited about, unless you consider SB-E, IB, IB-E, and Haswell in the next 2 years. I guess it will be a boring 2-3 years.

[/sarcasm]

 

[Absolution75]

I think people forget that its not like intel is going to twiddle their thumbs while AMD plays catchup. They will be researching advances now that will keep that ahead on future products. They could potentially have an entire backlog of technologies that they haven't implemented because they simply don't need to. The longer AMD isn't competitive, the harder it will be to stay competitive in the future.

 

[BigDH01]

Intel still has to compete with themselves. Their products can't get too expensive because people simply won't buy them. There's no reason to. If Intel wants to continue to move products, they have to obsolete their old products and convince people it's worth the money.

 

[Ken g6]

Also, I gather that processor development cycles take 5 years or so. Which means the next 5 years' worth of processors are at least in some stage of development. So, for at least 2-3 years we should keep getting better Intel processors. It's at that point when we could be in trouble - unless they decide to radically slow deployment of Ivy Bridge and Haswell.

 

[sm625]

lol I just bought me an HD4850 for $32 and a E6600 mobo combo for $44. This is gonna make a monster budget gaming machine. My main pc is barely faster with its 5770. Long live used parts! (I hope they work though...)

 

[Voo]

With a complete lack of competition at the high end, innovation is going to be stifled for at least 2-3 years.

You're looking at this from the wrong direction. Does AMD compete with Intel's high end? Well no, but that doesn't mean that Intel doesn't have any competition. Intel's business is SELLING CPUs, just having 90% market share isn't really helpful if nobody is buying new CPUs and that's exactly Intel's problem: They have to compete against their older products.

Why buy a new CPU if it's not faster than your old one? Current CPUs are rather hard to kill, so it's not as if you have to buy a new PC every year because the hardware died.

So new faster CPUs? We'll get them anyhow - although certainly with a reduced priority (but Intel has more serious worries trying to get into smartphones and what GPGPU could do, so that was to be expected). But they'll be a good bit more expensive, but we're most certainly not going for 300$ higher end CPUs to 1k (the 1k USD CPUs are for those few people with too much money, always a good idea to cover that market)

 

[pantsaregood]

Phenom was no where near the disaster Bulldozer is. The original Phenom was pretty close to Phenom II on a per clock basis, it just had serious issues with clock scaling. Intel was likely aware that a reasonable increase in clock speed would allow Phenom to compete with or even outperform Core 2.

Bulldozer, on the other hand, has nothing on Sandy Bridge. The cores are slower than K10 cores, and 45nm K10 was struggling to keep up with Nehalem and Sandy Bridge. A 4.2 GHz six-core or 4.5 GHz quad 32nm K10 would put up a much better fight against SB than BD can.

BD, at times, is only half as fast as a 2600K. AMD's high end is performing in the range of 50% of Intel's "mainstream performance" part. That is not good news for innovation.

 

[psolord]

I hope you all like your current CPUs.

With a complete lack of competition at the high end, innovation is going to be stifled for at least 2-3 years.

The best AMD seems able to do is a 4.4ghz Phenom II.

It will be interesting to see what AMD does with an absolutely puny R&D budget going forward.

Intel can just bide its time at this point. They're really only competing with themselves at the high end.

You know what, though, ARM might catch up and release something at 3ghz relatively quickly.

This could in fact be a good thing.

Developers could actually nail their fingers on their keyboards, in order to find more ways to extract all available processing power, from existing cpus. Going ridiculously multithreaded, will actually benefit every cpu from then on.

They could also be somewhat forced, to use DX11 more along with its multithreaded rendering features.

In any case, the PC is ridiculously powerful as it is. Until the next gen of consoles comes out, most available PC power will go to waste anyway.

Professionals can buy more cores anyway and be done with it already.

 

[PlasmaBomb]

WP.

 

[Genx87]

You're looking at this from the wrong direction. Does AMD compete with Intel's high end? Well no, but that doesn't mean that Intel doesn't have any competition. Intel's business is SELLING CPUs, just having 90% market share isn't really helpful if nobody is buying new CPUs and that's exactly Intel's problem: They have to compete against their older products.

Why buy a new CPU if it's not faster than your old one? Current CPUs are rather hard to kill, so it's not as if you have to buy a new PC every year because the hardware died.

So new faster CPUs? We'll get them anyhow - although certainly with a reduced priority (but Intel has more serious worries trying to get into smartphones and what GPGPU could do, so that was to be expected). But they'll be a good bit more expensive, but we're most certainly not going for 300$ higher end CPUs to 1k (the 1k USD CPUs are for those few people with too much money, always a good idea to cover that market)

Exactly. Intel will have to compete with itself. If I own a 2600K now and Intel doesnt release a successor to it for 2-3 years. What motivation do I have to upgrade(buy another intel chip)?

 

[pantsaregood]

Exactly. Intel will have to compete with itself. If I own a 2600K now and Intel doesnt release a successor to it for 2-3 years. What motivation do I have to upgrade(buy another intel chip)?

Intel doesn't have to compete with itself to sell CPUs.

Most people will buy a new PC with either a new OS release or when their current PC is running poorly for whatever reason.

Remember Netburst? It lasted from around 2000 to 2007. The only remotely significant architectural changes in that period were Prescott and Pentium D.

 

[piesquared]

You seem to be missing a few important details.

1). Have you looked at the GCN architecture, or watched Eric Demers keynote at AFDS? Bulldozer with GCN is a pretty potent combination. Bulldozer isn't at the end of it's life, it's a little over a week old.

2). AMD has been clear that their future is the Fusion ecosystem.

3). GCN is just around the corner, and Trinity just behind that.

4). intel isn't even in the same league for GPU develpment as AMD and nvidia. Good luck competing there, they've tried and failed every single time.

5). Bulldozer achieves it's target, competition in the high volume market and a forward looking architecture with CPU/GPU integration in mind.

6). "Enthusiasts" are a dying breed. At least the 'spend money at all costs to compete with a few thousand others in a handful of benchmarks' are. The REAL enthusiast, the ones that build their systems as a hobby or toy to play around with on a budget will always be the big market, and is growing. Mainstream being the biggest of all. The number of people wanting a $1000 desktop CPU are waning fast.

 

[Lonyo]

I hope you all like your current CPUs.

With a complete lack of competition at the high end, innovation is going to be stifled for at least 2-3 years.

The best AMD seems able to do is a 4.4ghz Phenom II.

It will be interesting to see what AMD does with an absolutely puny R&D budget going forward.

Intel can just bide its time at this point. They're really only competing with themselves at the high end.

You know what, though, ARM might catch up and release something at 3ghz relatively quickly.

Wait, so Intel is going to sit about doing nothing and let ARM catch up, because they don't have any competition?
Think about what you typed in your own post.

The "high end" is basically more cores. The cores themselves are pretty much exactly the same from the $50 CPUs to the $1200 CPUs (or more, in the server market).
If you let yourself be caught up in the low end by ARM, then you are letting your high end and low end go to crap.
It's not "hard" to just throw together lots of cores, but you have to keep making the cores better to keep going forward (obviously process technology etc also needs to keep being driven forward and it's not like gluing together two bits of paper, but designing an 8 core CPU and a 2 core CPU when the cores are the same isn't like designing an entirely new core). That's not to say it's easy to throw together more cores, but basically that's all the high end is, more cores, but the same cores.

Your argument makes no sense. Intel can't keep competing at the low end to stay ahead of ARM/prevent them becoming a threat while also giving up the high end unless they just get incredibly lazy and stop putting more cores on a single die.

 

[IntelEnthusiast]

Exactly. Intel will have to compete with itself. If I own a 2600K now and Intel doesnt release a successor to it for 2-3 years. What motivation do I have to upgrade(buy another intel chip)?

Today, we released the Intel® Core™ i7-2700K, but this may not be the processor that will fit your needs so we will continue to design and release processors to fit the demands of not only today’s software but well into the future. Our business model is called Tick Tock and will continue to drive us to make better processors for the foreseeable future. Our plans call for a new microarchitecture every other year and a die shrink on the off years. For 2012 we will have a die shrink that is already being talked about for it performance increases along with power drops that it should yield. So before you go and jump off a bridge due to how hopeless the future looks at least take a look at what the future has in store for you.

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

 

[Genx87]

Intel doesn't have to compete with itself to sell CPUs.

Most people will buy a new PC with either a new OS release or when their current PC is running poorly for whatever reason.

Remember Netburst? It lasted from around 2000 to 2007. The only remotely significant architectural changes in that period were Prescott and Pentium D.

Sure it does. Why would you buy another 2600K if you already own one?

What are you saying? Intel had competition during that time from AMD and didnt innovate?
AMD hasnt really been in the game since 2006 yet Intel is has released 3 arch\shrinks since and will release a 4th in the Spring.

Intel and microsoft and any hardware\software manufacturer will create advances to sell you a better product in order to stimulate demand. Even if it means competing with themselves. It is in their best interest.

 

[SickBeast]

OooOoo...Intel showed up and said to have a happy day.

The last time I checked, talk was cheap in the real world. We'll see what their tick tock brings and how much it will cost. :thumbsup: :thumbsup:

 

[frozentundra123456]

Today, we released the Intel® Core™ i7-2700K, but this may not be the processor that will fit your needs so we will continue to design and release processors to fit the demands of not only today’s software but well into the future. Our business model is called Tick Tock and will continue to drive us to make better processors for the foreseeable future. Our plans call for a new microarchitecture every other year and a die shrink on the off years. For 2012 we will have a die shrink that is already being talked about for it performance increases along with power drops that it should yield. So before you go and jump off a bridge due to how hopeless the future looks at least take a look at what the future has in store for you.

Christian Wood
Intel Enthusiast Team

I think sandy bridge is a great chip and do agree that Ivy and Haswell will be good improvements going forward. And I think it was decent of Intel to release most of the Sandy Bridge line at very reasonable prices considering their performance advantage over AMD.

However, I dont think the 2700K is much of an example of Intel doing anything great for the enthusiast. A 100mhz jump in clockspeed and a price increase on a chip that is designed for and marketed to overclockers means almost nothing. In fact it seems like a step in the wrong direction.

I actually am more happy about the price drops on the i3 2120 and some of the low end SB pentiums.

 

[ElFenix]

i have no doubt that intel will continue to push things because they have to convince you that your old stuff is slow in order to sell you new stuff.

however, i think a lot of the improvement going to haswell and beyond is going to be performance per watt stuff. sandy to IB typical desktop TDPs will go from 95 to 75 watts. i'm not sure clocks will increase a ton between the two (kentsfield -> yorkfield yielded 200 mhz). haswell is going to be designed with even more mobile usage in mind and maybe drop typical desktop users down to 45 watts. typical mobile users may be down to 10 watts. with improving batteries it could be a haswell derived chip would be available for tablets. that's especially true if intel can do what arm is and tag team a milliwatt x86 core with a haswell derived single digit watt core.

 

[firewolfsm]

Lithography advancements are slowing down. I see a trend of improvements moving to a more linear model as opposed to the exponential Moore's law.

You are right in that lithography advancements are getting smaller, but missing some information. First, these advancements are happening faster. The doubling time has moved from 3 years in the 80s, to two years in the 90s, and is now less than one year (especially consider mobile processors). Thus the exponential curve remains.

But, something in silicon technology progress is slowing down, and it will hit a wall, at this time however, and new type of technological progress will overtake the performance levels of silicon, say 3D or molecular computing, or perhaps graphene transistors, and then, with fresh ideas and resources, this avenue of advancement will be rejuvenated.

 

[WT]

I thought this was a thread about a Pentium III laptop running XP with 256mb of RAM. :\

 

[RussianSensation]

No. The dark ages presented themselves when Pentium D competed against Athlon X2. You either had to put up with hot and slow Intel CPUs, or very expensive Athlon X2 CPUs. $220 2500k that will be fast enough for just about anything until 2013-2014, and have very high overclocking headroom, is not dark ages. Also, your statement implies that Bulldozer will neither improve in power consumption or performance (i.e., higher frequencies) in the future. We'll get faster CPUs in Ivy and Haswell. Either way with the entire PC gaming landscape slowing down, and GPU generations now being replaced very 24 months, PC hardware lasts longer than ever (esp. on the CPU side). While some may find that "dark ages", it also saves you $ from unnecessary upgrades. Software needs to seriously catch up to hardware.

Dark ages would be if to have a fast system, you had to buy at least a $350-450 CPU, and only from Intel. We are not there, and likely won't be there since I expect BD to improve once AMD shifts to 28/22nm.