

Sebastian Anthony, gazing wistfully into a 22nm Intel Bay Trail wafer

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One of the topics that comes up fairly frequently in any discussion about enthusiast computing is the idea of switching to alternative semiconductors. For decades, we’ve relied on silicon — it’s cheap, relatively easy to mass produce, and we found multiple ways of extending its utility as opposed to integrating an entirely new material. But here’s the question — as enthusiasts, what would you pay for a return to “classic” CPU scaling, and how often would you be willing to pay for it?

Struggling towards a new economy of scale

One of the reasons Intel became the industry titan it is today is because it was able to take advantage of an enormous economy of scale. This was particularly true in the RISC workstation market, where multiple vendors competed to sell a very low number of microprocessors in absolute terms. SPARC, MIPS, Alpha, and PA-RISC were all extremely profitable at one time or another, but that profitability rode on tens of thousands of chips — not the millions of processors that Intel was shipping.

Electron mobility of various semiconductors

The electron mobility of various semiconductors. Silicon is the flat line at the bottom, as compared to the III-V types shown at the top of the graph

There are alternative semiconductors, like gallium arsenide, that could potentially hit far higher frequencies than silicon without shattering power envelopes — but the wafers for such chips could be 5-10x more expensive. The cores themselves might be larger, if Intel had to step back to an older process node to integrate the manufacturing. The end result could be a core that cost far more than a current chip, even if the end result was a much faster processor.

The graph above shows the electron mobility of various semiconductors, meaning the speed with which electrons move through the semiconductor in the presence of an electric field. Silicon is clearly not the best option if performance is the goal.

AMD R9 295X2

The AMD R9 295X2 has a massive 500W TDP, but it’s still fairly quiet thanks to its massive watercooling solution.

Over the last few years, Intel has chosen to focus on ramping up CPU efficiency. CPU TDPs, even on the desktop, have trended downwards, even as performance per watt has grown. Haswell and Ivy Bridge-E are good cores, but AMD generated far more conversation with the 5GHz FX-9590 — even if that chip also came with a 225W TDP. Then there’s the R9 295X2 — AMD’s new dual-chip GPU with a liquid cooling solution and a 500W TDP.

All things being equal, manufacturers and consumers both prefer low power solutions, but it’s possible that enthusiast consumers (at least on desktops) typically use TDP as a rough stand-in for noise level than a problem in and of itself. Clearly AMD felt that there was a market for a desktop 500W graphics card, provided that part didn’t sound like a dental drill. Were they right?

Given this, I’d like to ask the following:

  1. Take whatever you paid for the last CPU you purchased — how much would you pay for a core that was twice as fast? Do you have a use for the additional performance?
  2. What would you pay (in absolute terms) for a manufacturing shift that could return the market to better clock scaling — say, 15-20% a year, with additional architectural improvements, as opposed to the current status quo? (i.e. would you pay $1,000 for a gallium arsenide CPU?)
  3. If you’re a desktop user, do you actually care about TDP — or do you just use TDP as a proxy measurement for noise? If you knew you could buy a 225W TDP processor from Intel that was 15-20% faster than the 84W chip, but that both chips would be equally quiet, would you be interested?

Some of ExtremeTech’s writers and editors will be answering these questions in the comments below. For previous discussions, hit up the ExtremeTalk category.

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  • http://www.mrseb.co.uk/ Sebastian Anthony

    1. I have the Intel Core i7-4770K atm, which cost me around $400 (components are expensive in the UK). I don’t think I would pay much more for a CPU that was twice as fast. I have plenty of use for more CPU cycles (photo editing), but $400 is already quite a lot of money to spend on a CPU. I’d be more likely to wait a few years for that twice-as-fast-CPU to come down in price :)

    2. This is a tough one to answer. Computers are still getting more and more powerful every year — and even though they’re not improving as much as they used to, we’re seeing good gains in power consumption, mobile computing, etc. I would love to see us move away from silicon, but I think while we still see good gains in mobile/data center, I don’t think absolute desktop performance will matter too much.

    3. I used to not care about TDP at all — but now I’m more aware that higher TDPs can cost me quite a lot in terms of my electricity bill. Even so, the annual price difference between an 80W CPU and 200W CPU is fairly insignificant for me — so yes, I’d be happy with higher TDP parts (as long as they’re not noisy).

  • pelov lov

    1 – I paid $100 for a quad-core Deneb several years ago, and I’m still reluctant to upgrade. If I were gaming at 4K (so another couple of years?), I’d probably upgrade. The only real workloads that stress my PC are GPU related, like CAD work or gaming. So, no, outside of needing more CPU horsepower for 4K, I wouldn’t pay for it. Perhaps virtualization? But that has more to do with core and thread count as well as features. I’ve spent more on battery replacements for my laptop than I have on upgrading my CPU horsepower many times over. I just don’t need it.

    2 – For the CPU? Nothing. Until actual workloads require more CPU horsepower, I really couldn’t care less. I’d much rather the big chip makers invest into smarter thread schedulers, compilers, and just generally adapt software to be better thread aware. Decreasing the price and adding more features — fixed function units like QuickSync — make far more sense to me as well. I wouldn’t care about a CPU that’s 20% higher clock if the cheaper one on silicon can cut transcoding time by 1/10th the time using a small block of specialized transistors.

    3 – TDP really doesn’t matter so long as it doesn’t require exotic cooling. As far as power consumption is concerned, I’m far more concerned with idle power consumption than the max power consumption. The desktop isn’t a server running at full/medium load for its entire life span. I want more range.

    I’m not sure where you’re going with this article, Joel. Above all else, an enthusiast is defined as a person with knowledge on the subject at hand, and thus able to make rational decisions on said subject. So how on earth is a III/V semiconductor going to reinvent the software landscape? Last I checked, we’re moving at a blistering pace towards dumb mobile terminals (tablets or smartphones) with more of the work being shifted towards server farms. Hell, looking at Intel’s financial reportings it’s clear that they’re one of the culprits. They’re making a killing off of HPC, server, microserver and storage centers.

    There’s a lot more ground to make up on the GPU front, software landscape, and added extras than there is a need for more CPU horsepower. Very few people actually need 20-50% more CPU performance, but imagine how different the home network would be if 10gbE were available more affordable? Or better and cheaper high quality displays? I think many enthusiasts forget that computing is a combination of a lot of different devices and factors where the CPU plays just a tiny part.

  • http://ziffdavis.com/ sal cangeloso

    1. Dropped about $300 on my last desktop CPU – an Intel Core i7-3770S. I would have spent about $150 (50%) more for 2x the performance. I can’t really imagine spending more than $400 or so on a CPU for my home rig at this point, given how much I use it relative to my laptop, but if I could squeeze and extra year or so out of the chip that’s worth a $100-150 to me.

    2. By us paying more it sounds like we’d be kickstarting/paying for the chip maker’s R&D. I wouldn’t pay more for the process alone, I’ll let the market do that for me and I’ll pay when the products have improvement I can utilize. If I wanted to invest in Intel and its future I’d buy its stock.

    3. I like my desktop be very quiet and as efficient as possible so TDP is very important (so yeah, I see TDP largely as a proxy for noise). I purposefully chose a 65W TDP chip this time around and I absolutely would not buy a 225W powerhog for my home machine. I’d consider it for a workstation if that’s what I needed to get the job done of course, but for my personal desktop I see no need to ramp up the TDP that high just for a 25% gain, regardless of noise, because we will need to consider cooling and power consumption.

  • A. J.

    This article leaves out part of the equation. Do these hypothetical silicone replacements stay inefficient, or do they just start out that way? I’m not a tree hugger, but I do see the importance of CPU’s becoming more efficient per watt used, especially on the large scale. I’d prefer to go with whichever material will eventually be the most efficient.

    Sure gallium arsenide (whatever that is) may be bigger and more power inefficient at first since silicone has had so much R&D put into it. But in 5 or 10 years, would it reach or pass silicone in efficiency?

    To get back on topic, nothing I do requires a ton of CPU. I have a pair of homemade servers, but those don’t typically work that hard. They have quadcore CPU’s just for when they need them. I elected for an Intel “S” series CPU in my newest one. My other desktops in the house are less powerful.

    I wouldn’t pay a lot more for more speed since I don’t need it. And I definitely don’t want systems that are hotter, louder, and eat more electricity.

    That’s my $.02.

    • Joel Hruska


      My assumption is that these new products remain less cost-effective than silicon but scale more effectively. We can assume some modest improvement in cost generation over generation, but the gap between these chips and silicon would grow over the years as they pulled steadily away from what silicon could accomplish. Whether that would make them cheaper (net) I leave open to the reader.

      For simplicities sake I assume that a chip with 2x the performance of silicon costs 2x as much. Assume that the next generation of chip would hold the 2x cost factor but continue to increase performance.

      • A. J.

        I’m a nerd and it hurts to say it, but honestly, my PC’s are fast enough. I don’t think I’d pay more than the ~$200 I paid for my most recent CPU.

        But it would be nice if it did scale as you say. These days a big jump is 10 or 15%.

  • lacompacida

    For most of my use, low power consumption is great. All I want now is better multitasking (sessions and threads) in operating systems, especially in media access. There will be some need for high CPU speed high power consumption chips, but I suspect the demand will remain low, and hence won’t have the economy of scale needed to bring down the price. Current trend of putting more cores and cpu’s in single machinese is still great for servers, and won’t have to go to high power consumption chips.

  • massau

    I wouldn’t really go for faster CPU’s what i would like is a 30% performance/watt increase per year for an GPU or APU chip with an abstract programming languish which makes it easy to program for the chip and be parallel by default. something whit the same difficulty as python.

    also memory is still the bottleneck i would pay for the HMC type of memory and have processors with smaller caches and an ssd thats like 10 times faster or even better in memory processing.

    also a big cheap FPGA would be a lot of fun to use like a special purpose computer.

    i don’t really have any idea why we need a faster cpu nor a gpu if we stay at full HD resolution. nor do i knwo what to use all my current computing power for.

    i personal think fast memory and a way to have large screens in small form factors is the key, like Google glasses its projecter. imagine if it would be a 4K screen and you can carry it in your pocket and whit a size you can set dynamical.
    instead of a small 15cm monitor where you can barely read, game or browse on.

  • Mathew Binkley

    At home, we passed “good enough” several exits back. My “fast” home box is a Phenom x4 905E, and I’m not contemplating an upgrade until HL3, L4D3, or Skyrim+1 comes out. It’s not about how many pixels the game has anymore, it’s about how fun it is.

    At work, in HPC? Absolutely. I understand why Intel has focused on increasing the number of cores in recent processors, but Amdahl’s law is a serious real-world constraint for many codebases, so there’s no good replacement for single-core performance. Though I suspect any bump from moving off silicon is going to be more of a one-time thing instead of a new long-term exponential curve.

  • Michael Scoffield

    I spent 600 dollars on my pc back in 2010. I’ve upgraded the video card and the RAM last year for about another 200 dollars. I don’t I’ll buy a new one for some years to come. There’s just no need.

  • Joel Hruska

    So to answer my own questions:

    1). The last chip I personally bought was a Core i7-4670 at $220. I *would* pay more for better performance, because I tend to do enough desktop work to make it worthwhile. I also don’t own a laptop; this is my primary machine. I wouldn’t pay $450, but I might pay $400.

    2). A shift to gallium arsenide or equivalent might be worth paying extra for in the short term if I knew the longer-term performance curve would be better. I’m not sure how much.

    3). I really dont’ care about TDP, I care about noise and to some extent, heat. I really liked the configurable TDP concept AMD baked into the A8-7600, because AC doesn’t work real well in my home and I’d happily limit TDP in the summer day time, but crank it up again in the cool of the night or during the winter.

    I consider TDP to be most applicable as a proxy for heat generation and noise level. If I need to save power, I’ll put the system to sleep when I’m not using it.

  • Mark

    I’m curious, when the US actually has to deal with the 17.5 Trillion+ debt, will that slow technology progress?

    • Joel Hruska

      This really has nothing to do with the national debt. At all. The US government is not the primary purchaser of such products and is not investing in their creation beyond a few small DARPA grants. However, in more general terms, investing in basic science and in companies pushing the boundaries of technology are responsible for some of the greatest profit centers we’ve ever created.

  • Chuck Hunnefield

    More and more of my workloads (mostly video related), are dependant, not so much on the CPU as the GPU. That said, I still think there’s some headroom available for silicon, and it doesn’t always have to be ‘moar’ GHz/cores.

    • Joel Hruska

      Frequency headroom is pretty flat. That’s why we’re still mostly stuck below 4GHz (unless you’re willing to tolerate very high TDPs).

    • http://www.korioi.net/ Korios

      If the same tech was applied to GPUs what would be more efficient, an increase of the “cores” or an increase of frequency to, say, 2 Ghz+ levels?

  • Paul Stevens

    1. i paid around $300 for a 3820 cpu and yes i would pay double ($600) for a cpu that is twice as fast and i would be able to use its processing power (i do a lot of video transcoding)

    2. i would pay up to $600 for a cpu (double my last cpu purchase) but not $1000 unless it was 3X faster

    3. i dont care about tdp’s at all if it brings me high performance, the reason amd’s cpu’s are a bad decision as a high TDP processor is that you dont get the performance that you pay for with the high TDP, why purchase a 225W amd processor when an 84W intel processor will be similar or even better?

    i have custom watercooling that can easily handle 225W and higher processors so if they could make a CPU that is double as fast as what we have now at 225W TDP for $600 (pretty much what all these questions are really asking) i would jump at the chance to buy one

  • Mathew Binkley

    You can buy a 150mm silicon waver for $15, or a 100mm GaAs wafer for $119 from UniversityWafer.com.

    So 1mm^2 of silicon is ~ 0.000212 cents and 1mm^2 of GaAs is 0.00379 cents. More than an order of magnitude difference.

    But the Haswell die size is only 177 mm, so that works out to be 4 cents worth of Si vs 67 cents of GaAs. And I bet Intel gets a better discount than me. So I don’t think the cost of the substrate is the constraint.

    Partly for the sunk cost of several billion dollars worth of equipment, partly for expertise, the semiconductor industry is going to hang onto silicon until it hits a brick wall. Which, from what I’ve read, isn’t that far away. It’s rumored Intel is switching to an alternate substrate on the 10nm node (Cannonlake).

    • Joel Hruska

      That’s the base cost for a silicon wafer vs. a gallium arsenide wafer, yes, but remember — that GaAs wafer is designed for (most likely) 500nm manufacturing.

      A GaAs wafer manufacturered to 28nm tolerances would be orders of magnitude more expensive. Since none of the hardware or technology is in place to ramp it (and it would need to be a 300mm wafer, not a 150mm wafer), you’re looking at a much steeper cost difference.

      • Eric

        Yeah there is alot more too it than just saying a GaA costs xxxx. You don’t just build on top of the wafer, we etch Si in numerous steps before building out the transistors. It’s not as simple as just changing dry and wet etch chemistry and your substrate. The dopants and implants would also have to change. Basically, we would have to start over back at maybe 45nm. So faster clocks, but prob way less efficiency in terms of what we see now.

        • Robert Lucien Howe

          Surely all this is a matter of companies putting the money in and doing the research. Changing a dozen minor variables (like changing dopants) might cost next to nothing long term, but the real cost depends on whether current machines and techniques will work for the new processes or if they need adaption – or complete replacement (seems unlikely).
          Saying the above I remember when I was a kid back in the 1970′s that they were talking about gallium arsenide chips as the next big thing, seems they still are.. :)

      • Mathew Binkley

        Well, we go to war with the trivia we have, not the trivia we want. ;-) I presume (naively, I know) that whatever extra costs involved in growing ultrapure Si/GaAs, polishing, packaging, etc would be roughly similar so it wouldn’t affect the final price much either way. Fascinating article. I love articles on lithography. Given the slow scaling of EUV and the unknown unknowns of DSA, I’m extremely curious how/if Moore’s law dodges the brick wall in a few years.

  • Phobos

    1. I would not pay twice the price, because I don’t need that much power, I do expect my cpu to last me some 5-8yrs before upgrading the whole concept.
    2. Can’t answer that, I will have to look deeper for the cons and pros.
    3. I will go for a lower TDP and better performance.
    Honestly I will go for an OS that can make better use of old and new hardware.

  • Asdf Ghjk

    Given that last year I replaced my Q6600 with 4670K which has about 3x the singlethreaded performance when OC’d, and that I haven’t really noticed any noticable change in speed in anything I do other than games and occasional compressing/uncompressing files, I don’t think I would have paid a lot more than I would to just get more cores.

    So, for twice the number of cores I’d pay twice as much and for cores twice as fast I’d pay like 3x as much, not more. Things are getting parallel now and not having insanely fast singlethreaded perf. is not that much better than just having more cores.

    As a consumer, I wouldn’t pay a lot extra because I’m fine where I am right now.
    As a person interested in these sorts of things though, I would be prepared to pay extra just so the progress is on track (and not for direct personal gain).

    For 20% perf. boost, I probably would, because most solid PSUs would still do fine with such TDP and overall monthly energy consumption wouldn’t be that much higher since CPU is mostly idle.

  • Starglider

    Nothing, graphine && || carbon nanotube based cpu’s / gpu’s should take care of this…
    Just a shame they are going to drip feed the public/commercial sector speeds well below of what what the materials can easily offer on initial release, so they can make as much money as possible releasing version upgrade to version upgrade until at some point many years from now they actually release what they could have / should have released for generation 1 and start pushing development again. Graphine is rated to give us 200 to 400Ghz speeds+, you know where we will start off from, 4 or 5 Ghz lol.

    • Joel Hruska

      Graphene is decades away from commercialization in CMOS technology. Right now, it’s actually far *worse* than silicon for most of silicon’s essential features. It may never be commercialized for logic processors.

      There is an enormous difference between “Building one transistor out of graphene” and “Packing 4.2B transistors into a space a bit bigger than a quarter.”

      • Starglider

        1. 10 years at most, I would expect sooner, production of graphine has now been worked out by samsung and some other company has already worked out the dialectric issue or something

        2. Packing them in issue? This should be easier than you think, you do know the size of graphine right? Even without optimisation they should be able to pack more transistors into a penny than what we can do with silicon today

        3. May never be commercialised? There’s a chance it may not be and then again there’s an even bigger chance that it will be. You think silicon didn’t have issues when they started using that?

        Again if we didn’t live in a world which is driven by greed, power and corrupt corporations and governments the pursuit of such technology could proceed much faster. But us humans being the greedy apes we are will never progress to an optimum state of society and will slow our development as much as possible in the pursuit of greed and power (unless there’s war, where the trending development curve is reversed).

        • nikkkom

          > Again if we didn’t live in a world which is driven by greed, power and
          corrupt corporations and governments the pursuit of such technology
          could proceed much faster.

          You think communist countries, which weren’t “driven by greed”, had *faster* development pace? LOL…………

          • Starglider

            Never said that but I will leave you to your delusions. Were not talking about backward countries where religion is law and killed for and the price of life is cheap. Google StarTrek.

          • nikkkom

            LOL… What “religion is law”?? Google “communism”. Commies were against religion, and against “corrupt corporations” you are railing against.

            So it looks like your wish already came true, repeatedly, in the form of East Germany, Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea etc.

            These countries proved that “greedy apes slow our development as much as possible in the pursuit of greed” is not true – they had greed largely removed as a motivation, and it made things WORSE.

            Learn some history if you don’t want to repeat mistakes already made.

          • Starglider

            Religion has caused a lot of death in history and is still a major cause of shit in the world to this very day.

            I say everyone should learn to live in piece with one and all and watch lots of startrek. If not they will feel the wrath of a race of machines built to protect all inhabitable worlds from self annihilation by sending GORT to come and rectify things.

            Anyway, wasn’t this topic about lego or something?

            Move along…

  • ptmmac

    1. NO
    2. No
    3 yes

    I wonder how many people really know how different tech is now versus in the 1990′s. Microsoft and Intel both could count on new faster processors to make older ones obsolete. There hasn’t been Denson scaling for transistors since 2003. The real reason to improve performance per watt is that it can force upgrades in large businesses which otherwise would not upgrade. Intel is already staring at $30 cpu’s that are replacing it’s $100 basic laptop CPU’s with tablets. There is not a good solution for Intel going forward if they can’t find a reason for people to upgrade. Computers used to be obsolete in 30 months. Now they last 72 months and rising.

    The real problem for Intel is the $1 cpu that will be coming down the pike soon. Without a major change in computer systems there will only be one criterion for new computers and that will be price. The cost of climbing the wall of shrinking the transistor has been growing while the advantage that new parts have over old has been falling. If you look at Intel’s pricing you can see that this is true. 15 years ago a chip made with the prior generation of design was not a viable product on the market. Now the price is almost the same for both generations of a product.

    There will be a new process for computation in the next 5-10 years and it is likely to be photonics and spintronics rather than transistor based. The meta-materials necessary for these kinds of computers are being researched in many labs across the world. Intel is probably doing the same kind of work. It will be really surprising if they do produce the idea that kills the transistor, but if they do it will be the only way to save the company.

  • http://www.everythingillegal.com.au/ Damien O’Brien

    Honestly, I think we have enough power as it is. I cant even use all of what i have. and my rig is.

    Athlon II X4 620 @ 3.57GH/z
    7GB DDR 2 800MHz
    1Tib 10K WD Raptor
    GTX 760 3GB

    I dont see the need for more power tbh

  • RozzSummer

    Based on the comments I’ve seen, I’m clearly an outlier.

    I have 11 systems, with CPUs ranging from AMD FX-8350 to Intel i7-3930K, all stuffed with multiple Nvidia 780ti’s or AMD 7970/R9′s in each system. I run them at 100% duty cycle 24 x 7 running protein folding simulations (which costs about $800/month of electricity). I just upgraded one system from an FX-8350 I bought a year ago to an i7-4770K yesterday.

    Answer to Question 1: I paid ~$250 for the FX, and about $330 for the 4770K, which is about twice as fast, so I paid ~33% more for a 2x faster CPU. Yes, I do have use for a faster CPU. Even though the GPU’s account for the majority of the “work” done by each system, the throughput of each system is dramatically enhanced by moving to a faster CPU and a faster PCIe bus, from 2.0 to 3.0. The GPU’s stay much closer to 100% utilization (particularly with Nvidia) on a 3.0 16x PCIe interface and a fast CPU.

    Answer to Question 2: For a gain of 15% to 20% in additional clock scaling, I would pay up to $750 annual for that performance boost. For a 50% boost, I would easily pay $1,000. Frankly, I had a darn good investment year in 2013, and I’m considering purchasing a Cray XE6 that can be had for around $250K nicely configured. When some CPU simulations run for a couple of days before finishing, the Cray would cut that down to an hour or so. As I said, I’m an outlier.

    Answer to Question 3: No, I don’t care about TDP. The majority of my systems CPUs are water cooled and I blow the hot air from the radiators into my condo’s maintenance shaft that feeds AC to the central fire escape. I overclock all my CPU’s to the highest I possibly can (that’s stable), which is usually within an inch of their life. I also use auxiliary fans to cool the VRMs and Southbridge, blowing directly on these components (using zip ties to secure the fan’s position). All my CPUs run north of 4.5GHz. All systems are in Chenbro cases, installed in two 7′ tall 19″ racks. Some of the GPUs are water cooled, running through the same loop as the CPUs.

    If I can jam the Cray XE6 in my condo’s utility closet and vent the heat into the maintenance shaft like I do now I’m going to pull the trigger on the purchase.

    • Joel Hruska

      Is this for work, or for your own personal desire to help with things like protein folding?

      • RozzSummer

        It’s a personal desire. Actually, more like a personal mission. Everyone on both sides of my family has been taken from me by rogue folding proteins. I lost my only brother, mother, father and my wife to cancer. I’m now alone – I don’t have any family left. I know it will probably eventually get me too, but I’m not going down without a pre-emptive fight. So, more CPU power, please. And fast, if you can.

        I’m not a scientist, but I am a damn good amateur system admin with an unrelated very good paying job. If I can throw my skills and resources at the problem in the form of high-powered CPUs and GPUs, then I figure I’m doing everything I can to wage a smart fight. Giving ammunition to scientists that can actually do something with the results is all I can hope for. And not just for me, but for everyone.

        • Joel Hruska

          Hey, you can’t it with you. I admire your dedication and work.

  • Daniel Shepherd

    I am running a Intel Core i7-4820k currently. was about 800 dollars NZD when i first got it. So I really find no need that double the speed would help out to much as Most of the issues i have is down to the GPU rendering times and the HDD speeds.

    If anything the time and money would be better spent in developing more reliable HDD that have more storage capacity and faster read and write speeds.
    Also if you take a look at the CPU market the advances really are not like what they use to be, so i wouldn’t be surprised that the Major cpu manufacturers Hold back the advancements/new design/architecture in order to milk money from people.

  • Dustymack

    Wont pay more than $500 personally! But, In a way I hope the price skyrockets so I can go back to fixing computers and making real money again. Back in the 90s I made $100+ an hour…..

    Now if I did the same thing i would get $15 an hour and that includes my gas. What a rip!!

  • Anon254

    1. and 2. Image editing software is being optimized for GPUs and they should be ideal speeds when Photoshop and GIMP developers actually have time to implement things efficiently. Same story with gaming and compilers but it really depends on whether developers bother to optimize that really determines what happens here for CPUs. Scientific computing will however require as much computing power as it can get, however quantum computing, spintronics and top end solutions are available to them in similar time frames.

    So really what matters is the GPU performance in gaming for physics and graphics. Compilers could use the GPU to a limited extent though but that will take a while.

    So basically its developer time vs raw processing power. If one goes down the other goes up. Read the last two sentences again :).

    You only really need a high end CPU at the moment for programming or art, and you need one with a high single core clock speed as most compilers and graphics programs have a lot . Gamers should really be going with mid range unless they want a longer term investment.

    Developers have severe difficulty converting a lot of single core algorithms into multi core ones. The biggest pain is that waiting for one core to perform an operation and combining it will another operation on another core is in many cases slower than just performing both on one core because of the time it takes to move the data to the other core. So single core performance is really really really important because a lot of operations can’t scale to multiple cores.

    Graphics cards are basically CPUs with a lot of cores (which means more power overall) but the reason we have CPUs is really because of what I said in the previous paragraph (and because it would require a lot of redesign of a lot of things in the computing infrastructure to combine CPUs and GPUs). So basically many cores is a really really bad idea for CPUs (unless CPUs and GPUs are combined) because that is essentially what GPUs are. SSE and AVX are efforts to make CPUs more like GPUs but still aren’t anywhere near as fast as GPUs.

    I think I may have repeated myself quite a bit.

    3. TDP is important because of laptops and the ability to get rid of cooling solutions forever once computing power is sufficent. As far as pure power consumption goes, it will matter for mobile devices if battery tech does not advance much. But for now power consumption is really important as electricity is really expensive (this may become irrelevant if fusion power takes hold everywhere and power companies are not greedy (i.e. still charge high prices even though they could deliver much more (like telecommunications)).

    Conclusion: There are so many outcomes that could occur its really hard to say.

  • dc

    I’d pay as much as $600 and definitely do want a faster chip, not more cores but more speed. I don’t upgrade that often. Having said that, on a small production item I’m afraid the motherboard and such might be very expensive as well.

    What I’d rather they do is raise the cost by 25 percent and shove it down EVERYONE’s throat, so we can benefit from the economies of scale.

  • http://www.korioi.net/ Korios

    I would take a 4-core 8 Ghz over an 8-core 4 Ghz CPU (assuming their IPC was roughly the same) in a blink of an eye, but I would like to pay the same for them. Perhaps even better would be a 2-core 16 Ghz CPU.

  • collinsw

    I still have the first i5 760 that Intel produced, it is only just powerful enough for me but I will be upgrading soon. I would pay a premium for a CPU that has more power and greater flexibility. I will always want my programs to run faster, I remember when most people thought that the 120mhz Pentium was going to be enough for anything you could do on a computer. I would however, be wary of any chip that required an ice factory and a small power station to make it run.
    Really, what I would pay more for is an OS and programs, or apps, that are stable, flexible and can make use of that every bit of that power. I don’t game but do run a recording studio, and process a great deal of photographs and videos.
    Give me well written code and programmers that understand the needs of their users any day. That, I will pay top dollar for.

  • jdx42

    1. (Still) Running dual 2.8Ghz quad-core Opterons – costed a lot back in the day but they’re still decent and saved me a couple of expensive upgrade cycles.

    CAD/rendering/photography/virtualization (currently Hyper-V)/software development and some gaming – all can make use of a better CPU.

    Single core performance is important but not critical for me so I wouldn’t spend that much more on single core performance if it comes with a TDP envelope that makes 6-8 core dies unrealistic or enforces heavy throttling (and unpredictable/variable performance); I’m not a big fan of exotic cooling solutions either.

    2. For the right frequency and core count, I’d pay around $1000/CPU or more. If performance is doubled, it simply saves me from having to buy a two socket system so yes, I’d pay twice whatever the costs per Silicon CPU for a 2 socket system and even some small ‘premium’. If the price is right, I’d buy two and get a nice perf boost.

    3. A 15% faster 225W processor doesn’t sound like much over an 84W one (assuming same core count and architecture) – it’s within overclocking reach and the 84W one wins simply because it’s way more efficient; sounds like the 225W CPU would put out way more heat too so I don’t see how they would be equally quiet.

    TDP is important when choosing a cooling solution -> exotic/expensive cooling (>$200) is a no go for me.

    • Joel Hruska


      I’m going to assume that you’re on the Opteron 23VS or 2386 SE (quad-core, Shanghai core). So I’m curious about something. Those were pretty decent cores for the day, no question, but a modern high-end Intel chip would significantly outperform them for rendering. An eight-core Xeon with Hyper-Threading would probably be as much as 2x faster within a smaller power envelope (115-140W TDP total as compared to 115W per chip).

      So if I’m right with my guesses, why haven’t you upgraded? Is it the total cost of motherboard + CPU? The reason I’m curious is because CAD and rendering users are the stereotypical customers that Intel and AMD claim will suck down every bit of performance they can offer. You’re probably at the point where a new system would offer as much as 2x the performance — it’s interesting to me that you aren’t jonesing to upgrade.

      • jdx42

        Close – it’s a pair of 2387.

        AMD & Intel might be living in a bubble shared only with their big customers who, I’m sure, have different budgets and upgrade schedules; I’m no big studio and I tend to look for good deals (like Opterons were) – spend “big” once and keep it running as much as possible. I didn’t expect this system to last this long but it did.

        Upgrade got delayed for a number of reasons:
        - somewhat of an AMD fanboy so, for a while, I waited to see if anything new/decent comes out without ‘switching camps’.
        - the word-wide ‘economic turbulence’ realigned my priorities a bit
        - this one’s my home machine, only occasional renders
        - like many others have said already, the performance I get from the current system has been,most of the time, good enough (SSDs do wonders)
        - I did upgrade the GPUs two or three times and that helped a lot too
        - might not work for everybody but dropping in an additional GPU + GPU renderer is way cheaper than buying a new system
        - motherboard + RAM easily goes over $1000 and those Xeons you speak of are over $2000/CPU.
        - if virtualization support was better on the current mobo, I’d still be quite happy with it 80% of the time.

        The most I care about, for the next upgrade, is decent single core performance coupled with a good number of cores (8 or more, mainly for the VMs), long-term upgrade options and great virtualization support (which rules out 99% of consumer motherboards – not enough PCI-E ports on most of them anyway).

        Haswell-E might just be the right thing.

  • Peng Tuck Kwok

    Currently running a FX8320 which kicks about 120w (I think). I’m not really keen on clock speeds going up in the short term simply because I think clock speeds provide very short term gains vs hitting limits very quickly (temps, watts etc..) with the existing manufacturing process. I’d prefer if manufacturers made better multi-core solutions had more cores while also making sure the ecosystem to support that type of programming model is easy and accessible with tools SDK and compilers.

  • chojin999

    “If you’re a desktop user, do
    would be equally quiet, would you be interested?”—SERIOUSLY? That was the Tejas fraud (150Watt per single core or more) inside Intel done by some managers .. fake research centers in India.. they stole billions of dollars inside the group and almost caused Intel to go bankrupt… They sold the Prescott Pentium4 cores CPUs on the market but they were a huge failure. At the time AMD was gaining ground thanks to such a mess inside Intel. Then the Intel Centrino team in Israel came to the rescue and saved the Corporation before it was too late.. all current CPUs are based on improved Centrino tech for a good reason.

    • Joel Hruska

      Prescott broke revenue records for Intel and is one of the most brilliant failures of all time. Technically, it failed. But in revenue-generation terms it was the most successful Intel processor (at the time).

      Also, Intel sells chips over 150W right now. High TDP != failure of a part.

  • hahaha3425


  • jburt56

    Bitcoin mining.

  • AllWaysTalking

    I just price out three systems, one had 4 – Intel E7-8860 v2 CPU’s at $10,145.00 each, they are the fastest CPU (and the most expensive) that I know. In three years they will be obsolete so why would anyone pay that kind of money? Hint, government. I purchased twin 8 core Xeons four years ago and they are still going strong, I expect to make it until Intel releases the 14nm I7 with 16 cores in 2015.