Coffee Lake or wait for Ice Lake and 10nm?

[Zyperspace]

Hello, I am currently sitting tight for a great opportunity at upgrading. Right now I'm playing Medium-High in BF1 with my GTX 780 and i5-4690, a rig I've had for well over 3 and a half years now.

I'm looking to upgrade within the Christmas of 2018, but there's still some time for that. CPU is what will be the focus in this upgrade planning...
Coffee lake 14nm is next on the line, but I've read that Ice Lake is coming "late 2018" with 10nm architecture, and now all I'm wondering is:

Is it best to wait for new architecture, so I won't have to upgrade my motherboard and such too much? Or will it be fine to upgrade to Coffee Lake (14nm) and later to 10nm? I'm worried about the price here, considering I might end up having to upgrade too much because of the architecture changes.

Have a wonderful day to you all

 

[jeffreydanielbyers]

I highly doubt Intel will be able to improve much on the i7-8700K which is a 6-core, hyperthreaded CPU which may hit 5GHz easily.

There should be little need to go above that for gaming for many years to come, so I'd go for the i7-8700K with a solid motherboard that will last.

Why would you have to upgrade twice anyway due to "architecture changes"? You do realize that you're lucky to get a 10% boost with a new architecture change?

(That 25% FPS gaming boost is taken out of context for Coffee Lake. It's likely a very cherry-picked scenario for one game, comparing oranges-to-apples for CPU's)

Intel's pretty much hitting rapidly diminishing returns due to architecture. They also are only slowly increasing the frequency. They are coming out with the 6C/12T i7-8700K mainly to combat AMD's Ryzen so you get six instead of four cores for the top-end at about $350USD but it won't make much difference for most games at all.

 

[mitch074]

Hello, I am currently sitting tight for a great opportunity at upgrading. Right now I'm playing Medium-High in BF1 with my GTX 780 and i5-4690, a rig I've had for well over 3 and a half years now.

I'm looking to upgrade within the Christmas of 2018, but there's still some time for that. CPU is what will be the focus in this upgrade planning...
Coffee lake 14nm is next on the line, but I've read that Ice Lake is coming "late 2018" with 10nm architecture, and now all I'm wondering is:

Is it best to wait for new architecture, so I won't have to upgrade my motherboard and such too much? Or will it be fine to upgrade to Coffee Lake (14nm) and later to 10nm? I'm worried about the price here, considering I might end up having to upgrade too much because of the architecture changes.

Have a wonderful day to you all

Considering Intel's policies, expect having to change CPU + mobo every time you want to upgrade your CPU. If you game a lot, get the highest-clocekd Intel you can get. Otherwise, consider AMD: the AM4 socket will remain in action until 2020, making a CPU swap in the interim less costly.

 

[Finstar]

Gen 2 Ryzen cpus are also coming next year and are rumored to have pretty good ipc and clockspeed gains. As mentioned, AM4 will be supported until DDR5 comes out so upgrading to a new cpu will be less costly.

 

[jeffreydanielbyers]

Sure the AM4 socket may hang around longer, but then the i7-8700K will hands down be the best gaming CPU, with no need to upgrade that CPU and certainly AMD won't be competing with it for gaming any time soon.

You don't need more than six cores for gaming, and with a light overclock you can easily hit 5GHz likely on the i7-8700K so it's already 25% ahead in frequency before we even look at the architectural performance differences.

Or just look at the i7-7700K vs R7-1700X, and remember the i7-8700K is slightly faster than the i7-7700K and also has two more cores.

So again, why go with something like the R7-1700X which is slower, just so you can upgrade to Zen2 later in 2019 which probably still won't beat the i7-8700K.

 

[mitch074]

Sure the AM4 socket may hang around longer, but then the i7-8700K will hands down be the best gaming CPU, with no need to upgrade that CPU and certainly AMD won't be competing with it for gaming any time soon.

You don't need more than six cores for gaming, and with a light overclock you can easily hit 5GHz likely on the i7-8700K so it's already 25% ahead in frequency before we even look at the architectural performance differences.

Or just look at the i7-7700K vs R7-1700X, and remember the i7-8700K is slightly faster than the i7-7700K and also has two more cores.

So again, why go with something like the R7-1700X which is slower, just so you can upgrade to Zen2 later in 2019 which probably still won't beat the i7-8700K.

That's why I mentioned "If you game a lot" - because a 1700(X) will still most likely kick the butt of a 6-core Intel in the same price bracket in productivity tasks.
As for Zen2's performance on an AM4 chipset, I'd say that the only reason you'd want to change a motherboard today would be to make use of a more recent USB revision - with current CPUs being SoC and all... As a matter of fact, Intel is saying that they require a new chipset for Coffee Lake only because current 2xx chipsets can't handle the power draw of a 4+ core CPU. As AM4 is already rated for 8 cores / 140W CPUs, current AM4 chipsets won't be outpaced by Intel's before the end of 2018 at the earliest (except if Intel decides that you need to change mobo twice a year).
So, Zen2 may still fit snugly in today's AM2 motherboards.

 

[acosta.87]

Gen 2 Ryzen cpus are also coming next year and are rumored to have pretty good ipc and clockspeed gains. As mentioned, AM4 will be supported until DDR5 comes out so upgrading to a new cpu will be less costly.

Zen 2 is coming out until 2019. The 2018 release is just a refresh on a 12 LP process node that might as well provide better overclocking but zero IPC gains as it’s based on the exact same architecture. Expect IPC gains until 2019.

About upgrading I don’t understand why everyone is so worried about platform longevity. First off DDR5 won’t be here before 2021 and PCI Express 5 will most likely be finalized by 2019 and might come out until 2020-2021 and by then you will most likely want to upgrade your build anyway. How many people are still gaming on i7’s 2600K and have zero trouble?

I think the 8700K will last quite a while before you feel the need to upgrade. If you’re not in a hurry then sure, wait for Ice Lake and might as well wait for Volta and see how that plays out.