Future of Intel processors

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BigGreg85

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Hello! It has been quite some time since I have been on this forum, I used to be quite active about 10-12 years ago. I am going to be building a new desktop that I will primarily be using for GNS3(network design setups) with Oracle virtual box...these applications can be very CPU and memory intrusive when I have multiple virtual sessions running.

What I need to purchase is the following...

case
power supply
CPU
motherboard
video card
ram
(I am ok on storage, I have an SSD I can use)

I was looking at either the Intel i7 5820K or the i5 4670K. I like the price of the 4670K, but my concern is the sock 1150 will go away soon and wont be "future proof" in a few years when I want to upgrade the CPU. Do we expect the LGA2011 to be around for awhile?

Also any suggestions on a build would be greatly appreciated!
 
Intel has a funny habit of changing CPU sockets with every tock generation recently. I wouldn't bet on much future proofing because AMD hasn't been competitive so they have little incentive to provide upgradability without causing users to have to buy the whole shebang.

If you want "future proof" go with LGA2011 because it has more PCI-E lanes and you'll be able to add more cards without running out of bandwidth.

I would recommend http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc as a resource.
 
Ok great thanks, I will look through that. Would it even be worth it to look at AMD or are they just so far behind in processing power its not even worth it?

I am looking at building a system under about $1200
 
BigGreg85 said:
Hello! It has been quite some time since I have been on this forum, I used to be quite active about 10-12 years ago. I am going to be building a new desktop that I will primarily be using for GNS3(network design setups) with Oracle virtual box...these applications can be very CPU and memory intrusive when I have multiple virtual sessions running.

What I need to purchase is the following...

case
power supply
CPU
motherboard
video card
ram
(I am ok on storage, I have an SSD I can use)

I was looking at either the Intel i7 5820K or the i5 4670K. I like the price of the 4670K, but my concern is the sock 1150 will go away soon and wont be "future proof" in a few years when I want to upgrade the CPU. Do we expect the LGA2011 to be around for awhile?

Also any suggestions on a build would be greatly appreciated!
Click to expand...

Future proofing as a concept with regard to computer hardware always amuses me. You almost can't build with this in mind as what ends up standing the test of time is ultimately a crap shoot. No one could have predicted Sandy Bridge being viable for 5 years. Even so the platforms it launched with are woefully outdated and are finally starting to show their age. You can still get some more service life out of them with video card and storage upgrades but at this point their life span is virtually over. Technologies like M.2 are going to make them feel long in the tooth from a storage standpoint. Those platforms have mostly SATA 3Gb/s ports which makes additional storage slower than you might want. DDR3 RAM will rise in price as DDR4 manufacturing ramps up. The CPUs are already up to 40% slower than Skylake CPUs at productivity tasks per clock. One thing that's allowed them to hold on is the fact that GPUs are far more important to gaming performance than the CPU is. The second most important thing that allowed this platform to live so long is the fact that Sandy Bridge can out clock even the newest Skylake CPUs. 4.8GHz-5.0GHz isn't all that uncommon.

No one could have imagined that these systems would have legs this long. Nehalem was another one that stood the test of time well. Generally speaking though you have a three year window of opportunity to upgrade hardware with "new" parts. After that you have a window in the used market to continue to upgrade your rig. After that it's basically switching out old parts with slightly less old parts to make the machine less bad. X79's chronology illustrates my point nicely. It was launched in November 2011 and replaced in August of 2014. So that's roughly three and a half years of life as a current product with a current socket. Essentially you had both the 3xxx and 4xxx series Core i7's on that platform. The latter brought PCIe Gen 3.0 support to the table and a little more IPC. The update really wasn't worth it as far as most people were concerned. If you bought a lower end CPU, it was still an expensive proposition to upgrade these components until X99 came out and prices started to fall.

There is of course a used market and Ebay Xeons, etc. but this is luck of the draw and not necessarily a good option for gamers and enthusiasts. Many times the price of used CPUs is still high enough to put people off from making such an upgrade during the expected three or four year service life of a machine. After three years, your basically in an ever shrinking availability window as the older processors co-exist with newer ones and the older stock is phased out.

At the 5 year mark you are essentially buying ancient hardware people have dumped for newer technology. You can get by this way if you have to, but you probably won't be maxing out the visuals on modern games in most cases. The Sandy Bridge Core i5/i7 2500k/2600k chips are a rare case where such action is viable for getting good performance. Even so at 4k and higher resolutions, with some games these platforms are beginning to show their age.

Outside of the HEDT market things are usually a little worse as the sockets change every two years. If you bought into Devil's Canyon then you bought into LGA1150 late and your upgrade path is at the end. To upgrade you'll need a Z170 motherboard, CPU and RAM to get more performance. While the difference between the outgoing Devil's Canyon CPUs and incoming Skylake CPUs is small now, by the time of the next refresh the gap will grow. Skylake's refresh will be a dead end too as Intel will change the socket after that more than likely.

jahara said:
Intel has a funny habit of changing CPU sockets with every tock generation recently. I wouldn't bet on much future proofing because AMD hasn't been competitive so they have little incentive to provide upgradability without causing users to have to buy the whole shebang.

If you want "future proof" go with LGA2011 because it has more PCI-E lanes and you'll be able to add more cards without running out of bandwidth.

I would recommend http://www.reddit.com/r/buildapc as a resource.
Click to expand...

Well, Intel does this because they want to sell you on the whole platform. They also do this because they don't want to be pigeon holed by the design of the older platforms. Cross generational CPU microcode compatibility sucks. You can ask ASUS or any motherboard manufacturer who's release 990FX motherboards about that. It adds several technical challenges and it's not necessarily ideal for the customer either. Outgoing motherboards that are compatible with newer CPUs may not overclock as well or allow for full support of the newer CPUs features. The AM3+ CPUs C6 power state is unsupported on the 890FX boards as an example of this.

People always loved AMD's CPU compatibility but it creates nightmares with regard to BIOS updates. AMD's VRD guidelines aren't as strict as Intel's which is how you ended up with some motherboards having limits on what CPUs they could as a result of some CPUs having greater power draw than the VRM's could handle. On the Intel side we have never had to put up with such bullshit. It's also made AMD lazy as their platform hasn't been updated in years. This makes them even less attractive to buyers even as budget offerings. You can buy a decent, yet cheap Z170 chipset based board and a shiny M.2 drive along with a crappy dual core i3 and upgrade that i3 later when it becomes feasible. On the AMD side your at the end of the road (finally) and the platform really shows its age.

BigGreg85 said:
Ok great thanks, I will look through that. Would it even be worth it to look at AMD or are they just so far behind in processing power its not even worth it?

I am looking at building a system under about $1200
Click to expand...

They are behind in processing power and the platforms are ancient at this point. You also have zero chance of future proofing as AM3+ is a dead socket. If you want future proofing, AMD isn't going to cut it.
 
On aging platforms, I'm sure being stuck on PCI-E 2.0 was the bane of any AMD user's existence. AMD better step up to the plate with PCI-E 4.0 because video cards made for PCI-E 4.0 will not work in a PCI-E 3.0 slot.
 
You can easily build a 5820k system (minus ssd) for $1100 to $1200. You don't need to spend much more than $100 on a video card, and that leaves a 5820 plus 32GB DDR4 well within reach. You can bump it down an extra $100 if you live near a Microcenter.

From a quick research trip, there is no native nor any planned support for CUDA or OpenCL in GNS3. It's all done on the CPU.

I can't get any hard confirmation on how well it scales to multiple cores, but it sounds like it should (sounds like you can run separate emulated boxes on separate processes).

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