Intel shifting to two year cycles for desktop with no Broadwell being released?

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

More details here:

http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/32...-it-to-desktop

[kalniel]

*shrugs* Desktop PC market is saturated already. I've already skipped four generations (lynnfield, sandy b, ivy b, haswell) and still don't see any need to upgrade any time soon.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

On the flip side it will probably give AMD a bit more breathing space in the desktop market.

[kalniel]

On the flip side it will probably give AMD a bit more breathing space in the desktop market.

Yep, though arguably they've had that since Sandy Bridge, with Ivy B and Haswell giving such small outright performance improvements. Still waiting :/

[DanceswithUnix]

Yep, though arguably they've had that since Sandy Bridge, with Ivy B and Haswell giving such small outright performance improvements. Still waiting :/

If AMD are focusing on laptops as well, and I am very sure that they are, then it might be a bit of a wait.

They are behind on process nodes so they have less transistors to use, but they insist on spending about 50% of those transistors on graphics cores. That's great for a laptop, but chocolate teapot territory for desktop users. I hope they do another desktop chip, but they bottled out of a new socket with Bulldozer which has hurt their performance for ages now, but I don't see them updating until forced to by DDR4 memory going mainstream. They really need to get those PCIe lanes on the CPU out to a graphics card. My worry is that they will update the APUs to FM3, and let AM3+ die off.

[pastymuncher]

The performance increases are so small these days it won't make a lot of difference anyhow. Sandy to Ivy was small and Ivy to Haswell was even smaller. Same thing with Sandy-E and Ivy-E.

[ChinesePate]

Why invest billions in r&d when the competition is waaaay behind?
I hope this kind of thinking will backfire at Intel some day

[jigger]

Why invest billions in r&d when the competition is waaaay behind?
I hope this kind of thinking will backfire at Intel some day

Intel P4.

The reason that the PC market is slowing is because of the lack performance incentive over the generation's.
Intel have done very little to push performance since Core2 brought them out of the dark ages and AMD can only just about compete on price since then.

If we had another A64 or Core2 moment the PC market would boom again so thats why Intel should spend millions on R&D.

[ajones]

I would have thought they'd still be spending a similar amount in R&D, just not need to productise so often.

[krazy_olie]

Consumers aren't demanding it and neither is the software.

[jigger]

There's always demand for faster hardware. If you build it the market will buy it.

[Infinite]

I was waiting for Skylake anyway, was going to jump on to Haswell but my Lynnfield is still "good enough".

[DanceswithUnix]

There's always demand for faster hardware. If you build it the market will buy it.

I don't think they could build faster hardware if they wanted to.

Transistors used to get smaller and faster because the capacitance went down. Now the resistance goes up as much as the capacitance drops, so overall performance stays the same, and no "free" speed increase from a shrink. So they have to spend the extra transistors in a way that improves performance. Make buffers a bit deeper, SSE units wider, caches larger? It has all been done before, so returns are getting smaller. More instructions per clock? Harder than it sounds, thanks to about every 6th instruction being a conditional jump and predicting two jumps per clock is something I don't think has been solved yet.

Meanwhile, Intel slips into second place after TSMC as biggest semi foundry, because TSMC make stuff people want.

http://www.icinsights.com/news/bulle...World-In-2Q13/

[shaithis]

*shrug* who upgrades CPU every year anyway?

[minicale]

Not true the fx processors are great value the 8350 stands strong against the 4670k because you get an extra 4 cores and for a lot cheaper and its only slightly weaker

[Haggard]

Broadwell will still come next year but with a Q delay.