I really do wish people would get of the lets blame Intel bandwagon
A bit of Nostalgia courtesy of wayback…
http://web.archive.org/web/20031220161246/http://www.overclockers.co.uk/acatalog/amd_64_bit.html
The FX51 costing £499.95 (£587.44 inc vat at 17.5%) in December of 2003
At the time the the $/£ conversion rate was trending a relatively generous $1.72 / £
https://taxfreegold.co.uk/2003forexrates.html
Plug £499.95 into an inflation calculator and in 2016 £ that’s £727.77
http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/money/...tion-calculator-value-money-changed-1900.html
add vat (now at 20%) and you get £873.32 or so
The 5960X sells for £869.99 OEM or £899.99 retail currently on OCUK
$/£ conversion rates are currently a much less generous 1.41 $/£ (source google)
Blame inflation, blame VAT going up by 2.5%, blame the $/£ conversion rates but don’t just rant about it all being Intel’s fault that you have to pay the best part of £1000 for their current top end CPU because this sort of price level has been the case for well over a decade now (I remember the 90’s when even a basic computer was prohibitively expensive for a lot of people)
The other common complaint is that Intel are not increasing the performance generation on generation like they used to. This is a myopic approach for at least three reasons
1) It ignores the realties of physics that we are approaching the limits of what current silicon based CPU’s can achieve 5nm may be feasible for mass production but whether its commercially viable is yet to be seen. As we approach the limits of what the technology has achieve each increment has become increasingly more difficult and expensive to achieve.
2) There is also the reality that silicon just can’t support the massive increases in per core clock speeds that we have seen in the past. Performance gains for most of the history of CPU’s have relied upon the core speed of the processors being ramped up from a few MHz to 4+Ghz. Intel had originally hoped that its Pentium 4 Netburst CPU’s would hit 10Ghz + . They actually topped out at 3.8Ghz and we have not seen significant increases in per core clock speeds since the toasty 90nm Prescott CPU was released in February of 2004. IPC has improved in leaps and bounds since but again this is going to be subject to a degree of diminishing returns. CPU’s have more cores now of course but its not as simple to utilise more cores to improve performance compared to the performance jump that a simple increase in per core clock speed generates. Some tasks of course inherently cant benefit from more parallel computing and require the fastest single core performance to show good results.
3) and finally it ignores the reality that we a long time ago passed the point where the computing power of a CPU generated meaningful returns in terms of general use and productivity. Even the lowliest of desktop CPU’s is now ‘powerful’ enough for most uses. The emphasis has therefore rightly shifted to power consumption and incorporation of more functions (i.e. iGPU) onto the CPU die as the trend is to increasingly mobile devices.
So in summary I find the frequent diatribes against Intel on this forum and others to be poorly informed and misguided.
I neither work for Intel or hold shares in them of any linked company. I have had plenty of AMD CPU’s in the past when they were competitive and would love to see AMD become competitive and profitable again as although a duopoly is not great its preferable to a monopoly
