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Is the CPU landscape going to change much in 2016?

Goose

Goose

Goose

Soldato
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I've had my 2500k for a good four years now, maybe longer, and although it still copes admirably with my single 980 i've been toying with the idea of upgrading to a 5820K. Since I dont strictly need to upgrade within the next couple of months or anything I was wondering what things might look like in 6 months time. Will Skylake and Haswell-E still be around and if not will their replacements be significant steps forward? I know predicting the future isn't actually possible but all the GPU guys are getting pretty worked up over Pascal and die shrinks etc. and not being a CPU expert I wouldn't mind getting some insight in to what comes next.

Thanks :)
 
There will be a refresh of both skylake and haswell E. Kabylake for the former and broadwell E on X99.
 
It depends what AMD Zen is like and how far Intel are pushed. I wouldn't have any confidence in AMD to be competitive if it was just a minor process shrink but the jump to 14nm should help them hugely.

EDIT: assuming Zen is released in 2016 that is!
 
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Neither kabylake nor broadwell-e will be much of an upgrade over skylake and haswell-e respectively. Even the more optimistic projections for Zen put its cpu horsepower as being 'competitive' with current Intel cpu's (read comparable performance).

I think we can therefore safely predict that 2016 will be (another) thoroughly uninspiring year for cpu's

Kabylake is neither a new cpu design nor a die shrink at best the CPU part of the die will be a 'tweak' of skylake (basically effective to a new stepping). Other than that it will get an igpu buff with the large L4 cache for some chips from broadwell that will offer large gains for the igpu (which will be of no interest to pretty much anyone buying a 'k' series cpu) and will offer some modest cpu related benefits in some applications when using a discrete gpu

Broadwell-e will be a die shrink of haswell-e with the same cpu design there will be a small buff for stock speeds and a new 10 core top end part alongside some power savings from the smaller manufacturing process.

Overclocked however expect pretty much the same top end clocks to be attainable at around 4.5ghz for the six core part with lower clocks for the eight and ten core cpu's (on average, I'm sure 8pack will be along at some point with some high clocked, binned eight and ten core cpu's!)
 
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Caracus2k's assessment seems pretty much spot on to me. The biggest hope I've got is that Zen is good enough to spark price drops, good for those not on current gen but irrelevant to those already on the top options.
 
We hope Zen does arrive in 2016. From the information we got, Zen is supposedly around the Haswell performance which is not that impressive. The longer
it takes them to release it the less impressive it will be considering it will be up against whatever Intel has out or about to release around the same time.

If it is around the Haswell performance or even a little better than this and it does get delayed until 2017 then it is not going to appeal to many since
many of us will already be on a platform with the same or faster performance than it.

The only people it will really appeal too are those that are upgrading from an old slow system or first time computer buyers.
 
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Is Zen actually confirmed to be around Haswell in performance terms or is it just rumour? After Zen, the only thing interesting to most will be Cannonlake, as Kaby lake looks to be little/nothing on the CPU front and only a major upgrade to the IGPU.

I wonder if there's any big plans for Cannonlake or if it will just be the regular 5-10% IPC increase. Zen won't push Intel much if it's playing catch up as Intel will already be ahead, even if by 10-20%.
 
Perfect_Chaos said:
Is Zen actually confirmed to be around Haswell in performance terms or is it just rumour? After Zen, the only thing interesting to most will be Cannonlake, as Kaby lake looks to be little/nothing on the CPU front and only a major upgrade to the IGPU.

I wonder if there's any big plans for Cannonlake or if it will just be the regular 5-10% IPC increase. Zen won't push Intel much if it's playing catch up as Intel will already be ahead, even if by 10-20%.
Click to expand...

It was posted in another topic that AND themselves estimated 40% performance on top of Excavator for Zen and based on this, people estimated the performance of Zen to be around that of Haswelll.

I guess we'll just have to wait and see when it is finally released and we see the real performance figures. Here's hoping it is at least around the Haswell performance clock for clock and they don't take
too long to release it giving Intel chance to widen the performance gap even more before it is even released therefore making Zen not very attractive at all for many of us when it finally does get
released especially if the current Intel offerings at the time is quite a bit ahead of Zen in performance.
 
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Perfect_Chaos said:
After Zen, the only thing interesting to most will be Cannonlake, as Kaby lake looks to be little/nothing on the CPU front and only a major upgrade to the IGPU.

I wonder if there's any big plans for Cannonlake or if it will just be the regular 5-10% IPC increase.
Click to expand...

Cannonlake is just a shrink. It will do nothing.

So Intel has nothing until possibly 2019, if Icelake gets delayed.

Scary thought.
 
We could see a Skylake-E release in 2017 which will replace the x99 platform at the high end and possibly might come with 10 cores or more as standard going by their Broadwell-E release for the x99 platform in 2016 having up to 10 cores.
 
Some rumours suggest cannonlake make be Intel's first hex core + mainstream consumer CPU. Seems quite likely that this will pan out to be true, Intel hasn't been able to push silicon much above 4ghz stock 4.8-4.9ghz overclocked under air or water per core for some years now and there's only so much improvement to the core design possible so going for more cores is likely in a year or two as Intel struggles down to the physical/commercial limit for process size on silicon.

Still it is all rummors at this point and we are likely talking about 2017 before we see the CPU's in the flesh with skylake and kabylake filling the consumer lineout till then
 
Zen is going to get delayed because the business side will not be willing to release a CPU that competes with old tech from Intel, then AMD will work double-time to jerry-rig a somewhat decent GPU on there and release it as some revolutionary thing that pushes the envelope on that front, runs hot and drains copious juice, release Q2 2017, no overclocking headroom, the engineers will get a pat on the back and the company will make a killing from businesses, consoles and grandma, wholly underwhelming for precisely 98.7% of us here.

P.S. I dabble in crystal balls and such...
 
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It would be great to see AMD in the lead again by quite a bit like they did before forcing Intel to really push the performance
envelope like they did with Intel Core 2. The Intel Core 2 was quite a leap in performance compared to what was out at
that time by both Intel and AMD and was a revolutionary step forward.

It would be great to see that happening again.
 
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