http://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/0...ps-to-become-slower-but-more-energy-efficient

Not sure what to think about this. For most enthusiasts they don't really care about power consumption they just want the best possible speeds. I can see how the mass market wouldn't care so much about speed and would rather have power efficient chips.

But the gaming market is completely different to the mass market. People who buy a system with an APU because it is cheap and includes an integrated GPU to save even more money are going to want power efficient systems. Those looking to spend £800+ on a CPU are not going to care about power efficiency in the least all they'll look for is top of the range speed and good overclocking ability.

Yes I am aware that the more power a chip uses the more heat it generates and therefore the slower it overclocks but Intel seem to be managing OK at the moment. I don't see why we would need to go backwards in terms of performance.

Cromulent said:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/0...ps-to-become-slower-but-more-energy-efficient

Not sure what to think about this. For most enthusiasts they don't really care about power consumption they just want the best possible speeds. I can see how the mass market wouldn't care so much about speed and would rather have power efficient chips.

But the gaming market is completely different to the mass market. People who buy a system with an APU because it is cheap and includes an integrated GPU to save even more money are going to want power efficient systems. Those looking to spend £800+ on a CPU are not going to care about power efficiency in the least all they'll look for is top of the range speed and good overclocking ability.

Yes I am aware that the more power a chip uses the more heat it generates and therefore the slower it overclocks but Intel seem to be managing OK at the moment. I don't see why we would need to go backwards in terms of performance.

Click to expand...

This is inevitable. Intel are building CPU's for what people need. At the moment people don't really need more CPU performance than Skylake can bring for gaming, we're limited by GPU horsepower.

Also from a gaming standpoint, there are many cores/threads doing absolutely nothing in the vast majority of game engines out there. I expect it will take a good 5-10 years before this changes in any meaningful way, so lots of extra performance to leverage there.

And of course Intel can keep adding more cores to increase performance, though as above this is limited by software/games actually taking advantage of these cores.

If we had a truly multi-threaded game engine that could scale with a massive mount of cores, then Intel can keep adding 2 cores per year for the next 20 years without any problems, and it wouldn't matter if these cores weren't as fast as the previous generation - they already have 18 core Xeons available.

Guess Intel won't be advertising "Up to 10% faster than a 1 year old PC with xx CPU" next time then

I know most games are GPU bound but what about the ones that count more on the CPU? Devs are going to have to count more on DX12 etc to pass most of the work on to the GPU if this is the case.

Cromulent said:

http://tech.slashdot.org/story/16/0...ps-to-become-slower-but-more-energy-efficient

Not sure what to think about this. For most enthusiasts they don't really care about power consumption they just want the best possible speeds. I can see how the mass market wouldn't care so much about speed and would rather have power efficient chips.

But the gaming market is completely different to the mass market. People who buy a system with an APU because it is cheap and includes an integrated GPU to save even more money are going to want power efficient systems. Those looking to spend £800+ on a CPU are not going to care about power efficiency in the least all they'll look for is top of the range speed and good overclocking ability.

Yes I am aware that the more power a chip uses the more heat it generates and therefore the slower it overclocks but Intel seem to be managing OK at the moment. I don't see why we would need to go backwards in terms of performance.

Click to expand...

Because AMD, what Intel do that is bad is a result of AMD.

Everything is a limiting factor.

There are so many things that could be done with more CPU horsepower available.

This is hilarious. Welcome to monopoly consumerism.

Orangey said:

Everything is a limiting factor.

There are so many things that could be done with more CPU horsepower available.

This is hilarious. Welcome to monopoly consumerism.

Click to expand...

AMD catching up with Zen means things will still be stagnant for at least a couple of years, i guess.. Long wait for people wanting much more power.

So the 2700k will be good for another 5 years at least.

Further proof that waiting for Skylake-e and beyond is not worth it. Broadwell-e will last forever. Best time to upgrade IS end of this year. No exceptions. 6-10core CPUs with 14nm graphics.

For 95% of people modern Celeron + SSD is faster than i7 Oct core with HDD, just sold an i5 laptop with Hdd it was painful waiting for it to boot) because I'm so used to ssd

Orangey said:

Everything is a limiting factor.

There are so many things that could be done with more CPU horsepower available.

This is hilarious. Welcome to monopoly consumerism.

Click to expand...

More of a monopsony than monopoly, really (or perhaps that's what you meant). Monopoly is pretty much being the only supplier. Monopsony is pretty much being the only buyer. Now the Same For Less Power market isn't actually the only buying group, but compared to the enthusiast market, they're huge. So unfortunately, we're going to see a large drive towards lower power consumption for the main technological progress for a while. I correct myself - that HAS been what we've seeing for several years now. Battery life has been the most dominant influence on the processor market for some time. It's not AMD that Intel have been trying to compete with on reduced power (obviously), it's ARM. The prospect of ARM making big in-roads into the server market, the fact that people more and more have been shifting to small mobile devices dominated by ARM, these are things that scared Intel. Hell, Microsoft even released a version of Windows on ARM with the original Surface RT and Surface 2. I know - I have one. And whilst it's not as powerful as the x86 equivalents, I will tell you what it was - a viable OS that was easy to use and ran Word and Excel just fine.

The business and server markets are massive. Server market wants more power for less energy - always has, always will. Business market wants good enough for less energy.

I don't think we'll see raw processing power take primary development goal again for at least five years. There are interesting battery technologies on the horizon and we've already made great strides with that. Ten hours on a laptop charge is quite common now and that's "good enough" for many people. Give it a few more years for that to become standard and cheaper, we might see a focus on processing power start to creep back in.

However, I think this will be offset somewhat from an end user point of view by better multi-core design for software. It's not a cureall, but it can achieve a lot and there's room for improvement here. I don't think we'll see a pause in game graphics for example - I think that's going to continue to improve. Technologies like HBM will make a large difference here. I think late in 2016 when we start to see the premier Polaris cards, there'll be a significant jump in capability and in 2017, the games industry will start to really take advantage of new hardware developments. What I would like to see, personally, is less of a focus on resolution (1440P is plenty, imo) and more of a focus on textures and lighting. I mean we watch a Blu-ray at 1080P and think it's fine. Imagine what we could do with less of a focus on 4K graphics and more on realism?

It might be a blessing for AMD. Most of the independent fabs are focusing mostly on density and efficiency than high performance - it was mostly Intel and IBM(until recently) who were focussing on this. It means AMD will be on a more equal footing.

I guess AMD saw this coming too with their "25 by 25" "initiative" - which actually will be them just copying Intel and only providing the same speed at lower and lower wattages for the next decade?

What's infuriating is there are so many technologies on the horizon that DO provide massive breakthroughs in switching speed, IPC, thermal management etc.

So this Moore's law thing... we can scrap that now, finally?

I love how just a few days ago people were arguing with me that you shouldn't wait because there will always be something better on the horizon e.g buy 970 + haswell-e now!!!111 GGreat deal!!!

Then I told them Moore's law and how it's unlikely we will see such vast improvements as 28nm-14nm for graphics and 22nm-14nm for cpus.

I got no reply. Because the argument was over. Now this article pops up. Looks like I was right.

sam77 said:

I love how just a few days ago people were arguing with me that you shouldn't wait because there will always be something better on the horizon e.g buy 970 + haswell-e now!!!111 GGreat deal!!!

Then I told them Moore's law and how it's unlikely we will see such vast improvements as 28nm-14nm for graphics and 22nm-14nm for cpus.

I got no reply. Because the argument was over. Now this article pops up. Looks like I was right.

Click to expand...

At least 50% of people here are super impatient. Cannot wait, it would kill them.

You know the saying about money burning a hole in your pocket. I think the more disposable income you have, the more this is true.

I'm pretty skint so I save and I wait. If I was earning 60k+ like most on this forum, I'd have a 980ti by now

edscdk said:

For 95% of people modern Celeron + SSD is faster than i7 Oct core with HDD, just sold an i5 laptop with Hdd it was painful waiting for it to boot) because I'm so used to ssd

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Even 2 - 4 seconds feels slow once you're so used to it.

A lot of people just like building new rigs, Intel not giving us an excuse to indulge in our hobby is going to drive us elsewhere. I for one will not be mugged off with slower tat and higher prices.

Maybe I'll take up pottery.

No surprise. Its getting harder for Intel to build fast CPU's with less heat on a smaller chips. We should have hit 5ghz by now without turbo clocks but been stuck at 4.7ghz for awhile.

sam77 said:

I love how just a few days ago people were arguing with me that you shouldn't wait because there will always be something better on the horizon e.g buy 970 + haswell-e now!!!111 GGreat deal!!!

Then I told them Moore's law and how it's unlikely we will see such vast improvements as 28nm-14nm for graphics and 22nm-14nm for cpus.

I got no reply. Because the argument was over. Now this article pops up. Looks like I was right.

Click to expand...

1. Nobody mentioned Haswell-E in that thread! What was mentioned was getting a Xeon 5650/70 for somebody that already had a X58 motherboard. What were you smoking to think that a Xeon 5650/70 is Haswell-E

2. The guy in question games at 1080p and was having the 'odd hiccup'. A 970 now will play 1080p easily for while to come. You mentioned that you passed up Black Friday deals to wait for the next gen. Therefore you're advocating waiting for the best part of a year for something we're only guessing about...

3. You're making stuff up when you say people were saying not to wait because there is always something else on the horizon. That was not the reason anybody gave for not waiting. The only reason given for not waiting was the length of time and everything being speculative at the moment. Once things become more definite then a more educated decision can be made on whether to wait or not.

4. You mention Moore's Law as if it not being applicable now supports your point but actually it does not. If there are not going to be massive improvements in CPU and GPU performance then why wait for the next big thing. If you need something now you might as well get something now as there are probably not going to be major improvements just around the corner.

5. I did reply to you in the last thread... you can read it here. https://forums.overclockers.co.uk/showpost.php?p=29117055&postcount=61

I don't think suggesting an upgrade to a new cpu on a very old motherboard is wise.

Personally, I would much rather wait for shiny new Broadwell-e.

I don't spend money often, but when I do I make it count. Hence the whole 'people have too much money on these forums' theme. I was told to wait for Black Friday by a member of staff because the deals were just going to be insaaaaane. What we got instead were a couple percent off products that nobody even wanted. Then they still bragged to everyone about how much produce they shifted.

Profits, profits profits. Sales talk and uneducated consumers.

Lower end broadwell-e and pascal will not cost much more than haswell-e and maxwell. My 920 has lasted me until now, broadwell-e will last another 6 years and I will feel like a king knowing I have a product that will be able to handle anything thrown at it. Games will not advance so far that I am going to feel bottleknecked. That is not true if you buy current gen. So it would just be a waste of money. That is all there is to it.