Interesting Trend......

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wilson502

Limp Gawd
Joined
Dec 5, 2003
Messages
458
Its been quite a long time since i posted here, but id thought id post something that i thought was an interesting observation. As you can see in my sig. I built this machine back in march of 2009, and by todays standards its still a very kick ass system. 2 years have gone by since the i7 was released, and nothing new has really been released since then. I have also noted the prices on the hardware today have remained the same in the 2 yrs since its release...... this is also another trend that seemed to seem different than in pass trends. Ive been following trends in the industry for quite some time, but ive never seen a trend quite like this where a release of the i7 cpu an such have stayed up at the top, and it looks like it will continue to do so for the forseeable future..... The only thing new with the i7 is the 6 cores, but no real archieture changes like u used to see change quite frequently during years past, like with the p2, p3, p4, etc.
 
the athlons though went thru several evolutionary changes, socket, changes, architerture changes, etc. Unless theres an i7 killer coming from either AMD or intel, id like to be enlightened to that.
 
wilson502 said:
the athlons though went thru several evolutionary changes, socket, changes, architerture changes, etc. Unless theres an i7 killer coming from either AMD or intel, id like to be enlightened to that.
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well, the i7 started out as bloomfield (triple channel DDR3, lga1366), then made it to clarksdale (dual channel DDR3, lga1156), then made it to arrandale (on package IGP!!, crapton of sockets and BGA mount variants).

In addition to the above, the Intel Xeons also had Beckton (8 cores/16 threads, lga1567, quad channel DDR3 - AFAIK).

After that, the more famous 6 core westmere came out, to augment bloomfield.

Now it's about to spread out into another platform: Sandy Bridge. LGA1155, integrated IGP, and replaces the massive direct internal data connetions with one large ring bus (sort of like ATi's R500-R600 GPUs ring bus).


Nehalem, the underlying architecture of the i7, has went through a lot of changes, across 45nm and 32nm, across sockets, across overall platform implementations (NB on the CPU, or off package), and across lots of markets.
 
You'll probably see that trend for at least another year. It is pretty amazing how long the x58/i7 has stayed at the top. I've owned just about every generation in the past 15 years and I think this one has remained the same for the longest. At least back in the day clock speed actually mattered. But now an i7 at 4Ghz is just about as fast as anything else and I don't see anything on the horizon that will really be much different or a noticeable improvement.

At least GPU's are still improving.
 
needmorecarnitine said:
when the core2quads came out, how long did they dominate for?

How about the Athlons?
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AMD released the third-generation Athlon on October 9, 2001, code-named "Palomino", and named it Athlon XP.
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The Athlon 64 is an eighth-generation, AMD64-architecture microprocessor produced by AMD, released on September 23, 2003.
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The Athlon64 X2 was launched in May 2005.
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The Core 2 brand was introduced on July 27, 2006.
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The Core i7 brand was brought to market on 2008-11-17
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Sandy Bridge is launching around CES in January. It's no replacement for Bloomfield/Gulftown obviously but its a start.
Sandy Bridge-EX is scheduled for Q3 2011 and will replace Bloomfield and Gulftown.
AMD's Bulldozer is slated for Q2 2011 and its the first new AMD architecture built from the ground up since the Athlon 64!


So ultimately, he does have a point It will end up being nearly 3 years before Bloomfield gets fully replaced, previously it was less than 2 years (aside from Core 2 which lasted the longest at 2 years and 3 months) before enthusiasts moved on to the next greatest thing.
 
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The OP has a good point: If I were to buy an i7 system today, I'd go for a 920/30. With a nice overclock, I'd consider my system to be as good as it gets in the realm of sub-$800 processors.

A lot of the platforms mentioned in this thread did last a decent amount of time, but there were major changes throughout the life. Take the P4, for example. If I recall correctly, the first chips were all sub 2ghz, while the later ones approached double that. In the case of the i7, the people who bought the 920's 2 years ago would see no significant improvement through any reasonably priced upgrade
 
The PSU died in my main PC over the weekend and I wasn't sure how much damage it done so I had a look at building a new PC and even though the (non Gulftown) i7 's are pretty old and about to be replaced - they are still (more than) holding their values.

I'm not sure if it because Intel of segmenting the i series or because Amd is a sleep. But it is amazing how much the 920/ 930 in particular has held it's value (the price now is double what would normally be expected). It will be interesting how much this changes in a couple of months when they are overtaking by the first batch of sandy bridges.

Speaking of holding their value, I'm still using a q6600 @3ghz, which is still more than I need for most tasks (development and more recently, some gaming). I think I will buy sandy bridge when they're out, if anything just for their single threaded performance.
 
Aside from my now worthless Vraptor and aged 4870, my system is worth the same as what I paid for it 3 years ago. In terms of retaining monetary value the q9550 has been the best processor ever.
 
true to the q9550, it was the beast if you got A0 (or something like that) batch then OCing is craziness
 
flegg said:
Aside from my now worthless Vraptor and aged 4870, my system is worth the same as what I paid for it 3 years ago. In terms of retaining monetary value the q9550 has been the best processor ever.
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Yeah, the Q9550 has let me skip an entire socket type (1156/1366), and that has never happened before (at least for me).
 
Well, maybe the lack of desire to upgrade will mean low demand and low prices for my upgrades next year :)

Well, I guess I won't put my faith in Intel lowering prices without some competition. Here's to Bulldozer being everything we want and more!
 
If you say "trend" one more time... TOO THE MOON, ALICE!
 
BlueAqua said:
You'll probably see that trend for at least another year. It is pretty amazing how long the x58/i7 has stayed at the top. I've owned just about every generation in the past 15 years and I think this one has remained the same for the longest. At least back in the day clock speed actually mattered. But now an i7 at 4Ghz is just about as fast as anything else and I don't see anything on the horizon that will really be much different or a noticeable improvement.

At least GPU's are still improving.
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exactly man, i can run my [email protected] all day, and its as fast or faster than the extreme edition i7, I can push it to 4 ghz, but i dont like the idea of running lots of voltage to the CPU longterm, since i have an older stepping i7 .
 
I wonder if this is bad for sales. I mean, if you are going to build a rig today, paying the same for a 2 year old equiv, gotta be annoying.

Mind you, I would love to have such an "old" CPU :(
 
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