I can't wait until AMD releases Ryzen in March. I haven't owned an AMD system since socket 939, but Ryzen pricing is leaking now, and it looks like it's going to significantly undercut Intel's current prices. [0]
Let's hope this encourages Intel to discount their current and future chips. More competition is always good for the consumer.
Lets hope the Ryzen is the real deal.I mean the i7-3610 is just as good as my i7-6700hq which was like 3 or 4 years ago. Without competition we are in trouble. I remember when Athlon64 came it made Intel come up with core2duo which was a quantum leap from p4.
I agree with you that competition is important. I disagree that the improvements in generations of i7s are as minor as they superficially seem to be.
For at least my task, compiling large amounts of C++, the difference between the different i7s is huge. I get a new expensive laptop every two years (and a cheaper machine for portability or other purposes each off year). I have a high end 1st, 2nd, 4th and 6th gen i7 each machine is measurably faster with the oldest machine taking almost 10 minutes and the newest taking just about 2 minutes to build the same codebase.
You are comparing various mobile CPUs for each generation which isn't quite the same thing most people are likely talking about. Desktop and Mobile CPUs aren't the same thing (usually).
I suspect you are comparing the improvements along the lines Intel says it can still improve (lower power chips) but its simply because you keep buying laptops vs. desktops. If you had been buying desktops, I suspect you wouldn't notice the improvement.
My desktop I built 4 years ago compiles within ~20% as my desktop at work with its shiny new Xeon.
Every machine has a raid 1 of "high performance" SSDs. Most have Corsair force3 GTs. The 4th gen is an untrabook with room for only one SATA3 ssd, so I put a Mushkin M3 drive in in for the raid. The Newest machine some other SSD that is just slightly faster. The read speeds are something like this 1st gen -> 1.2GB/s, 2nd gen -> 1.2GB/s, 4th gen -> 1.1GB/s (the M3 drive slows it slightly), 6th gen -> 1.3GB/s.
Each machine is faster than the previous by a wide margin, far more than the proportional speed difference from the slowest to the fastest. There is almost a whole minute between (3m to 2m) from the 4th to 6th.
The first gen has 2 cores with hyperthreading (looks like 4 in gnome system monitor), the quad cores with hyperthreading where far out of my price range. All the rest, the 2nd, 4th and 6th gen have 4 cores and hyperthreading (looks like 8 in gnome system monitor).
For reference each of these was around $1,600 plus or minus $200, except the 6th gen. The 6th also has an nVidia 980 (not the normal mobile version) and 4 total hard drives. The other two drives are large mechanical disks that I only mount when I am doing stuff with movies or other large offline data, I do not believe they have any impact on the benchmark. This machine cost $3,200 after all the crap I did to it.
Do SSDs make any noticeable difference? I think I once read a post (maybe from Joel) where they bought SSDs and the difference in compilation time was negligible.
I think it might even depend on the build complexity. It is possible to write code that requires insane amount of CPU time with the write (wrong?!) kind of C++ template metaprogramming.
The stagnation in desktop single-core performance is taking a toll on my productivity as software continues to bloat. Yes, I have a massive number of cores in my desktop workstation, but most are idle at any given moment. With CPU-wasteful single-threaded software, there are far too many applications that routinely fail to keep up with my input.
I know it's popular to advise new programmers to avoid concurrency because it's a "hard problem," but the wasted cores of my CPU keep screaming for something to do. They yell: "It's a shame so few people write multithreaded applications! Alas, back to sleep for me."
Well, why don't you learn a concurrent language like Go, CUDA, or OpenCL and do something about that?
From my vantage point, I remain amazed that people have fled concurrent programming in an age where the hardware for doing so has not only thrived, but which may also be the only path forward from here.
I write plenty of multithreaded code of my own. What I am grieving is our CS education teaching new programmers that they should avoid concurrency because it's "too hard." I don't have time to make Thunderbird use more CPU cores so that its user interface doesn't block at times.
Go isn't comparable to CUDA or OpenCL in terms of parallelism, which is what matters here. Go doesn't even have SIMD available without writing assembly.
Intel already failed to get off of 14nm with Kaby Lake, and now they're pushing it back another cycle?