Smaller, Faster, Cheaper, Over: The Future Of Computer Chips

Here’s NYT’s take on Moore’s Law and where things might be headed.

The glass-is-half-full view of these problems is that the slowdown in chip development will lead to more competition and creativity. Many semiconductor makers do not have the state-of-the-art factories now being designed by four chip manufacturers, GlobalFoundries, Intel, Samsung and TSMC.

The global economy slowed, software progress is weak, the elements that drive the investment in new manufacturing tech is just not there right now.

Big changes in software that requires more power and speed will start the ball rolling all over.

We are in a lull, enjoy the peace.

The glass-is-half-full view of these problems is that the slowdown in chip development will lead to more competition and creativity.

Click to expand...

Sure, good luck with that. Meanwhile people with 2500K's are laughing at Intel's new Skylake.

Ashbringer said:

Sure, good luck with that. Meanwhile people with 2500K's are laughing at Intel's new Skylake.

Click to expand...

And yet I just bought one, upgrading from Yorkfield. Why? Because Sandy Bridge and Haswell, when you can find them, are priced only $10-$20 less than their Skylake equivalents. I would have saved more on motherboards, but traded away the latest features in the process. DDR3 would have been cheaper than DDR4, but not enough to offset the speed gains.

So if you need to buy a new CPU ecosystem for some reason, there's no reason not to go Skylake, even if there's not enough gains to motivate a SB owner to upgrade for performance alone.

Ashbringer said:

Sure, good luck with that. Meanwhile people with 2500K's are laughing at Intel's new Skylake.

Click to expand...

It's that head in the sand approach that the industry ignored dating back even to the 90's and some old timers might say even in the 80's. Nobody took the "end game" seriously until it finally started becoming an undeniable reality. Counting on the inevitable brick wall to spur innovation is a novel and optimistic viewpoint, but that never once actually addressed the issue when said.

Commander Suzdal said:

So if you need to buy a new CPU ecosystem for some reason, there's no reason not to go Skylake, even if there's not enough gains to motivate a SB owner to upgrade for performance alone.

Click to expand...

Intel CPUs tend to hold their value very well. But yea if you're buying a new CPU you should go with Skylake. Also because Intel is pulling out their Broadwell-C chips cause they perform better. Then again you'd want to go with Haswell-E instead of the 6700K cause 6 cores is better than 4 cores.

In other news AMD really needs to release Zen.

Ashbringer said:

In other news AMD really needs to release Zen.

Click to expand...

I really hope Zen is a game changer. AMD needs a win right now to survive. Intel has gotten so complacent and lazy without effective competition. If AMD doesn't shake things up, it looks like sandy bridge will be running strong another five years.

However, AMD has had generation after generation of chips that we were told were going to be revolutionary. Only to be disappointed by over hyped trash that gets beat by Intel chips that have been on the market for many years.

Damn it AMD, live up to your marketing hype for once!

OldandCrusty said:

Intel has gotten so complacent and lazy without effective competition.

Click to expand...

CPUs have gotten cheaper, draw less power, are more powerful, in a smaller footprint with more built in features, not sure what you are going on about.

This is also in the face of nothing pushing the need for more power, in the software side of things. There has also been a large push to mobile, which needs less power draw, and smaller size, which we have seen large gains in. Sadly to say, the gamer/enthusiast market is not what drives Intel/AMD, its the mass market, and right now, most people I know do not have desktops anymore and if they do, they are aging and they have no plans on buying a new one once it dies.

A P4 just back in 2000 for upper range would run you $560ish, in today's dollars that is over $770, while a top range brand new Skylake i7-6700K is $370. Yeah, they sure have gotten lazy.

Ashbringer said:

Sure, good luck with that. Meanwhile people with 2500K's are laughing at Intel's new Skylake.

Click to expand...

Depends on what your using it for. For gaming and day to day it's not much of difference. For video encoding, which I do, your looking at a 50-100% increase in speed between a stock 2500K and stock 6700K.

That's a big increase, but also one of the few applications you will see a noticeable increase.

BlueFireIce said:

A P4 just back in 2000 for upper range would run you $560ish, in today's dollars that is over $770, while a top range brand new Skylake i7-6700K is $370. Yeah, they sure have gotten lazy.

Click to expand...

Intel has had $1000 CPU's since the Pentium 4 days.

westrock2000 said:

Intel has had $1000 CPU's since the Pentium 4 days.

Click to expand...

For Extreme Edition (EE) CPUs or server CPUs yes, I am talking normal CPUs which is what I was comparing, the P4 Extreme Edition was also $1k back in the early 2000's, which is almost $1,400 today, your point being?

It is also worth noting that the EE line Intel today is a highend work station socket 8 core CPU, that again, has orders of magnitude more CPU power, features and costs less than a EE CPU from the P4 era. People who suggest they have gotten lazy really need to step back and look at how much more affordable computers and devices have become as well as how much more powerful, and speaking of $1k CPUs from 15 years ago as if nothing has changed today only shows ignorance about our fiat monetary system and inflation. This is about the same as claiming cars have not gotten more fuel efficient because it costs more today to drive them than it did back in 2000, without looking at the fact gas prices had almost quadrupled in that time.

BlueFireIce said:

For Extreme Edition (EE) CPUs or server CPUs yes, I am talking normal CPUs which is what I was comparing, the P4 Extreme Edition was also $1k back in the early 2000's, which is almost $1,400 today, your point being?

Click to expand...

Sorry, the point was that they have had outrageous priced CPU's for a long time now. It was not arguing anything you said.

I am not sure what the complaint is ... the hardware is way ahead of what the software and users demand ... if there is any gap, it is that we don't have any technology that demands processors two or three times faster than what is out there ... we now carry more power in the palm of our hands than the first few generations of computers offered ... everything is computerized now from vacuum cleaners to refrigerators to washer/driers ... we have replaced super computers that used to be proprietary and super specialized with parallel processing powerhouses that give significantly more performance for a lot less cash ...

if there was an actual mass market need for processors with twice the speed then companies would try to figure out how to satisfy that need (but we have no such need at this time) ... come up with an app or program than needs 10 GHz and 20 cores and someone will figure out how to make the hardware to satisfy the need ... but there is little point in continuing to offer more and more features that people are not clamoring for and are unwilling to pay for

westrock2000 said:

Sorry, the point was that they have had outrageous priced CPU's for a long time now. It was not arguing anything you said.

Click to expand...

outrageously priced is relative ... if they had their baseline mass market processors in that price range then I would agree, but they only go for their highest priced tiers for the performance tiers that require more performance or reliability (but are a fraction of the sales for the mass market processors which don't need that)

it would be no different than complaining about a Cobra Mustang being outrageously priced compared to its mass market brother the regular stock Mustang ... it is not unreasonable to expect that niche high performance products can and should cost more than their mass market counterparts

kbrickley said:

outrageously priced is relative ... if they had their baseline mass market processors in that price range then I would agree, but they only go for their highest priced tiers for the performance tiers that require more performance or reliability (but are a fraction of the sales for the mass market processors which don't need that)

it would be no different than complaining about a Cobra Mustang being outrageously priced compared to its mass market brother the regular stock Mustang ... it is not unreasonable to expect that niche high performance products can and should cost more than their mass market counterparts

Click to expand...

Indeed.

For some time we saw large pushes to more power, more cores, then we reach a point where people have way more CPU power than they ever use, and more people going mobile, now we see a push to drop power draw, and less of a push for raw power, we are also seeing a much bigger movement in the storage space, which shows far bigger gains than even a 100% gain in CPU power would show in most applications other than maybe workstations for given workloads. So as long as more people stay mobile, and there is no new software must have that pushes the need for more CPU power, I do not expect to see massive gains in CPU power. Rather we will see smaller and smaller chips with less and less power draw.