Stagnancy

This is just a general musing, but has the increasing of CPU power ground to a halt these days? I bought a Phenom II x6 1100t around when they came out around three years ago. I had expected to upgrade by now and I bought my Sabretooth 990FX motherboard with the expectation of doing so. But I skipped over Bulldozer because it didn't really seem to give me anything (though I respected the architectural changes) and now I'm looking at the latest Piledriver chips and I might upgrade, but performance-wise, it just doesn't seem much of a boost.

I'm on the AMD side and have perhaps a skewed view on things. Is it only AMD that is now transferring their focus to efficiency rather than power? Or are Intel like that too - they're way ahead of the AMD chips in terms of power, but generationally, they seem to be progressing more slowly now.

Have I misread how things are going or are we really seeing a slow down in the race for more power? After three years of waiting, my only upgrade path seems to be to move to Intel. Is there anything big on the horizon or is competition now defined by TPW?

Steamroller should be out within 6 months, and show great IPC improvement over piledriver.

So, let's wait and see.

Your mobo should be compatible BTW...

manu2b said:

Steamroller should be out within 6 months, and show great IPC improvement over piledriver.

So, let's wait and see.

Your mobo should be compatible BTW...

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I think you've just lost AMD the sale of a Piledriver chip.

So is Steamroller is going to be substantially more powerful - that's good news. I read here that the APUs would be first quarter 2014. I can wait till then. But another article here said that the APU versions would be coming out ahead of the ones that didn't have graphics built in. If that's the case, it's going to be a disappointing wait.

Well, I could not honestly advise to upgrade from a [email protected] to a piledriver.

I had a few AMD systems (955@4Ghz, 8120@5GHz, 1075t and [email protected]). Last one was the 1100T until couple of months ago. The best ones were the Thubans. Strong multi taskers, good gamers and all that within reasonable temp range.

Even now, if I were to build an AMD rig, I'd go with a used 1090T/1100T and a good mobo that would support pcie3.0.

manu2b said:

Well, I could not honestly advise to upgrade from a [email protected] to a piledriver.

I had a few AMD systems (955@4Ghz, 8120@5GHz, 1075t and [email protected]). Last one was the 1100T until couple of months ago. The best ones were the Thubans. Strong multi taskers, good gamers and all that within reasonable temp range.

Even now, if I were to build an AMD rig, I'd go with a used 1090T/1100T and a good mobo that would support pcie3.0.

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Yeah. That's where I'm coming from. I'm a long term AMD user and I kind of like supporting the underdog. And their performance has been good enough so far that I can stick with them without it causing me problems. But I like to stay up to date and I like to progress. And AMD just hasn't given me anywhere to go. I have my 1100t at a 24/7 4GHz overclock which is very modest (I've taken it quite a bit higher) but this is my main work machine and with six real cores, it does well. The probable upgrade to Piledriver (maybe an 8350 or a 9590) is in good part just frustration. Three years on I want real power improvements and for real world cases, that's just not much of a boost. I guess if Steamroller is a real improvement, I'll wait for that.

My post was mainly triggered by a post on Anandtech where they compare mobile and Desktop CPUs. It seemed to me that even Intel was slowing down the power-improvements in favour of power-consumption being the big marketing point. I just wondered if I what I was seeing really is the case - is the race for power slacking off in favour of efficiency, now?

I'm inclined to think Intel slows down because of lack of competition from AMD...

I agree w/manu2b, the x86 CPU manufacturers are trying to milk their existing designs for every penny. I only say this because IBM has CPU's that are much more powerful than anything Intel or AMD are selling now and I find it hard to believe IBM is that much more ahead of the curve than AMD and Intel.

magellan said:

I agree w/manu2b, the x86 CPU manufacturers are trying to milk their existing designs for every penny. I only say this because IBM has CPU's that are much more powerful than anything Intel or AMD are selling now and I find it hard to believe IBM is that much more ahead of the curve than AMD and Intel.

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I know nothing about IBM's processors. Are they x86 or some other architecture? Could I, basically, install Linux or Windows on an IBM system, plug in a GPU and run y normal programs? I'm guessing not, but you never know. Would IBM ever re-enter the domestic market?

^Nope

manu2b said:

^Nope

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Thanks.

My opinion is, the improvements have slowed because no one needs better CPUs. Right now they're just working on making them more efficient. Same processing power with less power consumption. The efficiency improvements inadvertently slightly improve IPC performance, but that's about all they're working on right now. And right now, they're just doing that and adding features.


I'm okay with that, though. Keeps me from having to upgrade so often lol.
I just did my first major upgrade in a few years, from a 1090T to Haswell.

h4rm0ny said:

I know nothing about IBM's processors. Are they x86 or some other architecture? Could I, basically, install Linux or Windows on an IBM system, plug in a GPU and run y normal programs? I'm guessing not, but you never know. Would IBM ever re-enter the domestic market?

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The two IBM CPU's I know about are the Power 8 (a PowerPC derivative) and their mainframe CPU's. The Power 8 is far more powerful than anything Intel or AMD have available now and expensive, you can't buy the CPU by itself, only whole systems through IBM. The PowerPC architecture has nothing to do w/x86. I know the older Power 5+ CPU's could run Linux, I'm not sure about the newer ones though.

IBM Power cpu's are not consumer grade kit. They are commercial grade and the prices reflect that. They certainly are not sold for $200 on NewEgg!

chrisjames61 said:

IBM Power cpu's are not consumer grade kit. They are commercial grade and the prices reflect that. They certainly are not sold for $200 on NewEgg!

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I wouldn't even call them commercial grade, they are more enterprise products. They are also so astronomically expensive that they don't even bother with having a sales configurator on the website. You can get in the IBM System P machines and those typically cost millions.

Charr said:

I wouldn't even call them commercial grade, they are more enterprise products. They are also so astronomically expensive that they don't even bother with having a sales configurator on the website. You can get in the IBM System P machines and those typically cost millions.

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So IBM doesn't even bother to quote prices on their new Power 8's? So is it a case of, if you have to ask, you can't afford it?

I've been working on an old IBM Power 5+ system with 16 cores (which I think, since Power 5+'s are dual core CPU's, consists of two 4 CPU modules). It has 32 cores/slots when considering SMT. It has 96 GiB of RAM, probably DDR. The SPECint2006 suite indicates it has more performance than a single, 6 core Intel Westmere E5645 Xeon (of any speed). I wonder how much it cost new relative to high end Intel server systems of the day.