No real CPU updates in 2014- No real reason?

[grec]

I'm wondering what people think of the CPU release forecast for the next year. On the desktop, Intel only plan minor Haswell refreshes(Presumably just clock bumps and bug fixes) on LGA(Skipping Broadwell in Sockets, with even the mobile version delayed until late 2014 due to 14nm problems), so there probably won't be a real CPU upgrade from Intel until mid-late 2015.

From current roadmaps, AMD also have no new FX series planned(They've shown they still have new designs ready, with Steamroller coming in APU's and Excavator floating around in die shot form), but presumably producing, shipping and designing several new APU's and SoCs, from rapidly selling games consoles to desktop parts has left little time for more with such a small company.

So the future looks sparse, but do AMD/Intel actually see much reason to keep pumping into top end CPU parts?
With Intel mostly maintaining an overall lead in performance, they surely see little reason to push forward. But at the same time, AMD have been moving to focus more on gaming, and since an FX8350 has been seeing big performance increases just from software changes in modern games on Windows 8(Admittedly, even with patches Windows 7 is still pretty slow on modern AMD hardware), for example in Crysis 3 where it trades blows with the vastly more expensive i7(Which actually does see a performance increase over the i5 due to C3's 8 thread support), and to a new extreme where a £110 FX8320 UNDERCLOCKED TO 2Ghz(So presumably also a £60 Athlon X4 750K at stock) now performs as well as a top end i7 in MANTLE based games, while being vastly cheaper, I presume AMD also see little reason into putting more money into upgrading there CPUs(Lets face it, they'd be much better off putting it into marketing so people actually know a lot of this stuff).
With HSA(Currently AMD only, but little reason why Intel wouldn't jump on board in the future) and OpenCL(Which Intel and AMD are both big on) seeing such big performance improvements over traditional x86-64, both companies putting more die area into GPU space on their APUs(Whether Intel like to call their processors that or not), and x86 CPU performance increases wanning, does the high performance x86 CPU market still have much life left in it?

 

[Wraith]

AMD already said they will NOT be dropping the dedicated Desktop CPU even giving us info indicating the FX (AM3+) to continue into late 2014 early 2015 this was all revealed at the AMD Developer Summit. While the APU market is exciting and the tech developments are trending more inline with future tablets and laptops especially with the new Kaveri and Beema chips, I still say though there is far more to be done with a dedicated seperate CPUs & GPUs.

There is life in the old dog yet.

 

[SeekaX]

i think intel even dropped broadwell for desktop, the next update will be in 2 years and it will be skylake, which should finally be a tock again, can't really complain about that. idk anything about the next AMD CPUs, read somewhere that there will be more FX CPUs.

 

[Zoot]

Does the high performance x86 CPU market still have much life left in it?

It's not a priority nor does it represent any real volume for Intel or AMD, all that it's in mid-range to entry level, and in laptops in particular. Us enthusiasts represent a tiny portion of the overall market sadly, although there is the "Halo" effect so I'd say we'll continue to see high performance CPUs from both camps.

Although at the moment, Intel is scrambling to make up for lost ground in the mobile world and they're now throwing all their weight behind their low-power mobile CPUs, with a mind to get into smartphones/tablets to get a slice of the huge growth pie there. They've yet to get any big profile design wins though; Qualcomm very much rules the roost there.

AMD then is concentrating their resources and focusing on niche areas such as Micro-Servers, Semi-Custom or low power APUs geared towards tablets. It's a good decision given their size and limited resources, even if we enthusiasts don't like it.

Neither Intel or AMD are doing much in the high performance segment at the minute and that doesn't look like it's going to change for another year at least. You've just got to see what 2015 brings, I wouldn't say high-end x86 is a dead-end, it's just not going to be a priority for Intel or AMD going forward.

I think at this stage I myself might just wait it out until DDR4 platforms show up, I see my FX-8350 doing me fine until then.

 

[SeekaX]

AMD then is concentrating their resources and focusing on niche areas such as Micro-Servers, Semi-Custom or low power APUs geared towards tablets. It's a good decision given their size and limited resources, even if we enthusiasts don't like it.

i actually like that AMD is focusing on APUs, kills the market for horrible stuff like GT610s

 

[grec]

Of course next generation dedicated CPU's will come, but I guess the bigger question is how useful will they still be. With both Intel and AMD looking like they're going to be doing desktop socket CPU updates at half the rate they do mobile/APU/mainstream(Meaning they make lack feature sets, technology, and be on process nodes upto 2 or so years behind the "mainstream" parts), and with GPU compute(Through either basic OpenCL or technology like HSA) looking to be much more efficient on FPU-heavy or highly parallel tasks, along with software like MANTLE making CPU bottlenecks almost completely non-existent in a reasonably CPU heavy game even with bleeding edge GPU's, the already small market for high end CPU's will likely shrink further, which in turn will probably increase the cost due to the lower volume runs, which might even force some users to use mainstream parts.


Personally I'm running an FX8320@4.6Ghz, but personally I find even this £130 set up(£105 for the CPU in a SuperSale on ARIA and £25 for the cooler) to be kind of overkill for gaming and occasional rendering(Even when I force it to 1.8Ghz(Force idle state) in Catalyst I barely notice a difference during general use, the only time I really feel like I could use more speed is during encryption/decryption, compression/decompression, and big(30-200GB .) file/format conversions, all of which would generally be much faster on OpenCL/HSA due to them being almost infinitely parallel/threaded computations.

 

[Zoot]

AMD gets about 46% of their revenue from discrete GPUs and the remaining 54% from APUs/CPUs, the percentage from graphics is much higher now than the last quarters thanks to the game consoles. Intel on the other hand gets 62% from non-server CPUs and 22% from server CPUs.

This is going on both companies quarterly earnings for Q3 2013:
http://www.intc.com/results.cfm
http://ir.amd.com/phoenix.zhtml?c=74093&p=quarterlyearnings

There's no mention of the what the high-end desktop makes for both companies, you'd probably have to be working for either company for that. ^_^

 

[grec]

There's no mention of the what the high-end desktop makes for both companies, you'd probably have to be working for either company for that. ^_^

I know AMD have released these numbers, around 80% of their CPU/APU sales are purely APU's, and most of the FX processors sold were the cheaper 4000/6000 series parts(I don't understand why anyone would buy an FX4000 CPU when the 6000 series is often around £5-10 more though), infact, in Q32012, AMD sold x36 more mobile Bobcat APU's than 4M8C Bulldozer/Piledriver parts. I know after R&D and production costs up until recently when they sorted their marketing out they were making a loss on FX CPUs and were doing it purely to please enthusiasts more than anything else.

 

[Zoot]

I know AMD have released these numbers, around 80% of their CPU/APU sales are purely APU's, and most of the FX processors sold were the cheaper 4000/6000 series parts(I don't understand why anyone would buy an FX4000 CPU when the 6000 series is often around £5-10 more though), infact, in Q32012, AMD sold x36 more mobile Bobcat APU's than 4M8C Bulldozer/Piledriver parts. I know after R&D and production costs up until recently when they sorted their marketing out they were making a loss on FX CPUs and were doing it purely to please enthusiasts more than anything else.

I'm curious, where are those numbers coming from?

 

[Wraith]

I guess this gives us a break retail wise and some real time to concentrate on getting the most from the already available stock, overclocking really is the answer.

 

[MacLeod]

I dont think there will be much for CPU's and guys like us in 2014. From their perspective, their CPU's are already overkill for 99% of whats out there. Think what kind of rig you have to have in order to get an i5 breathing hard. A pair of GTX780's at 5760x1080 or something crazy like that?

I dont think they see a need to bring out anything faster than they already have. With the desktop market shrinking, the current CPU's more than powerful enough and everything going mobile/tablet, theyre putting all their focus on products like AMD's APU's and low power offerings.

 

[Remmy]

I dont think there will be much for CPU's and guys like us in 2014. From their perspective, their CPU's are already overkill for 99% of whats out there. Think what kind of rig you have to have in order to get an i5 breathing hard. A pair of GTX780's at 5760x1080 or something crazy like that?

I dont think they see a need to bring out anything faster than they already have. With the desktop market shrinking, the current CPU's more than powerful enough and everything going mobile/tablet, theyre putting all their focus on products like AMD's APU's and low power offerings.

I'm disappointed that's how it's going, I've had my CPU for a few years now, I want an upgrade for the sake of it to be honest, but I'm not entirely persuaded by Haswell offering limited extra performance and a lot of heat :/

 

[Zoot]

I dont think there will be much for CPU's and guys like us in 2014. From their perspective, their CPU's are already overkill for 99% of whats out there. Think what kind of rig you have to have in order to get an i5 breathing hard. A pair of GTX780's at 5760x1080 or something crazy like that?

There's various benchmarks floating around of CPUs like the Q6600, E8400
Phenom II X4 955, Phenom II X6 1090T pitted against the more current offerings like the i5-3570k or FX's when it comes to gaming. The i5 or FX's are undoubtedly better but the difference isn't enough to notice in most cases.

I want an upgrade for the sake of it to be honest

Don't we all!

 

[WYP]

the only games that give my cpu a good workout is rts games like total war and some civ 5.
even then both games are usually heavily modded, especially civ 5 (all civs on one epic map!!! can really hurt loading times in the later game).
apart from those very specific situations my cpu doesn't even break a sweat.

 

[grec]

I'm curious, where are those numbers coming from?

You'll find a lot of numbers and data sets like this on S|A forums, there are generally a few guys in industry knocking about there. In terms of what gamers use, the Steam HWsurvey is a good place to get ballpark figures- http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey

For the AMD 2012 sales portions, http://gyazo.com/05511ec7de182de63b8a93bda7dae9ca

Sites like SeekingAlpha can also be a good place to look, some writers give pretty useful info for investors into current sales figures and the financial side of things.

the only games that give my cpu a good workout is rts games like total war and some civ 5.
even then both games are usually heavily modded, especially civ 5 (all civs on one epic map!!! can really hurt loading times in the later game).
apart from those very specific situations my cpu doesn't even break a sweat.

I also generally find this to be the case, and to be honest, I'd rather have 12 or 16 weaker cores available to us than fewer faster cores, at least then I could run a few VMs in the background on their own dedicated cores without taking a noticeable performance hit, it'd vastly lower the need to use a second or third PC for doing other tasks. It's just a shame a consumer CPU like that isn't really available, if AMD/Intel did a 12/+ core Jaguar/BayTrail at consumer orientated prices I'd probably get rid of this FX8350.