Replies to post #135291 on Intel Corp (INTC)

[morrowinder]

unkwn: It's not competition

Much of the low hanging fruit in CPU design is gone. Have you noticed that AMD is not exactly setting the world on fire catching up? Its all hard from here on out and process technology makes all the difference. SIMD instructions, SMT, integrated mem controllers, larger and faster cache, 64 bits, SSDs are all fait accompli on X86. And btw, your third CPU line already exists in the socket 2011 lineup. That will expand to 8 cores for those that need it and use DDR 4 in the 2nd half. As for mobile: Haswell has made tremendous strides in energy efficiency. And if you compare todays laptop chips to a 4 year old laptop, you see a pretty remarkable difference:

http://www.intel.com/content/www/us/en/benchmarks/laptop/4th-gen-core-i5-4300m-vpro-4300m.html

[Tenchu]

You're kidding me, Unkwn. You think the reason why Intel CPU performance has only improved incrementally as of late is because of lack of competition?

Tenchu

[Tim May]

The performance increases are happening via more cores, better GPUs, more transistors, more X, more Y, etc. And customers are willing to pay for the faster solution. I just did with a Mac Pro, Xeon E5, 6 cores, 12 threads, 512 GB SSD, dual AMD FirePro GPUs, etc. Likewise, recent supercomputer plans mentioned widely. Lots of CPUs, and plans to use the Knights Landing chip.

And Intel is well aware of the competition. It faces serious competition from AMD in those aforemented GPUs. (I am sure Intel is not thrilled to only get the CPU part of the Mac Pro and similar machines from HP, Dell, etc.)

We know precisely why CPU speeds were going up consistently for a long while, then got throttled back and have remained topped-out in the 3-3.5 GHz range for several years.

And it ain't because AMD stopped being as much of a threat in CPUs as it had once been.

--Tim