Sadly, AMD are ceding the market for high-performance processors for the time being. It doesn't look like there will be a Steamroller pure-CPU, though I imagine we'll still see releases on the server side.
I'm like you - long-term AMD user, but later in the year I shall probably be shifting to Intel for the first time.
I actually think AMD are being very smart about this. It unfortunately doesn't suit me as someone who wants and will pay for raw power, but it suits the larger market which wants cost-effective chips. For years, the enthusiast market has been bolstered by the size of the home PC market. If everyone has a PC in their home, why not make the modicum of effort to also produce some slightly above average enthusiast chips.
But now we have tablets everywhere and much more capable laptops, the home PC market has shrunk rapidly. Okay, not many people are doing serious work on their iPad, but MS have produced the first good "productivity" tablets (I'm typing this on a Surface 2 right now and it runs both Word and Excel fine) and a lot of home PC use was just light browsing and chat anyway.
Combined with the fact that hardware is now "good enough" for the main bulk of the market, you're not seeing people upgrading every few years, either.
AMD have usually been on the back-foot performance-wise when compared to the Intel-behemoth, but they've very often been ahead on smart market-manoeuvring. It's one of the reasons I think they're awesome as a company. Look at their purchase of ATI - it cost them a fortune that hit their profits hard, but look how it's working out for them! Both in immediate pay-off and strategically.
AMD are actually ahead of Intel strategically at the moment. Performance - no, of course not. Which is disappointing for me who'd love a high-end Steamroller chip. But AMD are now offering a complete solution in one cheap chip. It's enabled them to grab both the PS/4 and the XB1 contracts and whilst I recommend Intel for anyone wanting to build a super-high end computer, I recommend AMD for everyone else.
Seriously, anyone who isn't high-enthusiast right now should get an AMD system. You mentioned about whether we'll ever see not needing a GPU at all - for plenty of people Kaveri is actually that. You can low-end game on it which is fine for the child being given a computer by their parents and to the none-gamer, it's a decent chip with much better graphics than their normal no discrete card PC.
I think we will see AMD return to enthusiast-class chips at some point. They're not going to give up the server market so they'll always have a basis for returning to pure CPUs for the home market. But I think we'll have a long wait. There's an outside chance we'll see a Steamroller pure CPU, but I think the chances of that are low enough that I just bought an FX-8350 on the assumption we wouldn't. I'd educated guess nothing for at least the next few years.
They can't compete with Intel for the high-end and with the factors of tablets, better laptops and existing owners' hardware no longer needing upgrades, the market for home PC CPUs is increasingly only the high-end.
AMD are wisely adjusting their strategy and looking at how else they can make their money. CPUs are not the bottleneck for most now. Unless someone has a wild budget, my advice to them for gaming machines is to buy a medium CPU/APU and plough the spare cash into a better GPU, SSD. If someone isn't a gamer or wants only very casual gaming, my advice is get an APU and forego the discrete GPU altogether. In either scenario, AMD meets the use case most cost-effectively, imo.
Anyway, that was a long post. It's an odd one because it's praise for AMD's strategy from someone who is about to leave for Intel because of it. But that's my take on things.
from what iv seen around the only thing there really working on lately is mobile hardware and newer APU's, im kind of excited to see if here they can get to a point that a dedicated GPu isn't necessary, but i really hope there working on a new performance cpu as well, its seems most companies are starting a race for performance per watt and low power consumption as they get close to to silicone transistor size limit, but i would really hate to see them drop out of the performance cpu market
One good thing about this is that it might drive faster memory. With the APUs using the RAM on the motherboard rather than RAM on board a discrete card, there's a greater incentive to actually have high-end RAM. Right now, people buy it because they like bigger numbers (probably that sums up the mindset of every forum member here, am I right?
), but in real world scenarios gains are way out of line with actual costs to get them. APUs change that.
Intel are shifting to DDR4. I'd like to see AMD produce some significant leaps in their memory controllers as one of their next selling points.
I'd also like to see dual-socket solutions move more into the mainstream, but that may be fantasy. Imagine two APUs doing crossfire with each other and no discrete GPU in sight.
But it would be good for me as someone who needs raw processing power. I wonder how two Kaveris would stack up cost-benefit wise against a single powerful Intel chip? It would be interesting. The world of software is still catching up with the mass availability of high core numbers. There are a lot of old libraries out there that could use some modernization. We should be seeing advancement from that for a little while to come even aside from further increases in hardware.
