Generations of Hardware

[prince_xaine]

This should be a somewhat easy question for most of you. I'm new to hardware. I forced myself to do research, learn about building PCs, and succeeded in building my first real rig. But as of how everything advances, I'm completely lost.

It's hard to explain the nature of my question, hopefully my giberish-like language here can be deciphered by the masters of hardware.

So how do they pick the name of the next generation of CPU socket types and Graphics cards types?

Example: LGA1155 was superseded by? And why was this socket name chosen?

Example 2: GTX 780 was superseded by the GTX 970? Why was this number chosen?

The reason I ask, is because every time I research for parts for computers I build, I have to look each card up because I can't tell from looking at the name that a GTX 980 is better than a GTX 1060.

It looks like, to someone who is new in all of this, that the names for everything just randomly move from generation to generation. Like when Windows 8 went to Windows 10, skipping 9 for no reason.

Sorry for the noob question, I just can't wrap my head around all of this. Thanks in advance.

 

[rgd1101]

try wiki
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LGA_1155

Predecessor LGA 1156
Successor LGA 1150


example 2, 7xx to 8xx to 9xx to 10xx to 11xx

 

[Gam3r01]

I cant tell you why windows chose their naming scheme, but I can clarify some things.

LGA1155 was replaced by LGA1150. Now, the names of these simply refer to the number of pins in the socket, so the names mean nothing in terms of whats better, just how they made each socket. This is something you have to figure it, its not plainly named. AMD does it a bit better, AM2, AM3, AM3+, AM4 etc.

Graphics cards are named based on series xxx and model xxx. A 9xx series card is newer than a 7xx series card, 8 was skipped because it was an OEM series. There is no direct replacement scheme for them though. You cant tell just by model number what card is better, hence why reviews are a thing. Generally speaking, each new series has about a one-two setup up compared to the last. So a 970 is outperformed by a 1060, but is only marginally better than a 980.

 

[ritvarsdavis]

You mean why was lga1150 chosen as a socket name? Because it consists of 1150 pins (one thousand one hundred and fifty).

 

[prince_xaine]

I cant tell you why windows chose their naming scheme, but I can clarify some things.

LGA1155 was replaced by LGA1150. Now, the names of these simply refer to the number of pins in the socket, so the names mean nothing in terms of whats better, just how they made each socket. This is something you have to figure it, its not plainly named. AMD does it a bit better, AM2, AM3, AM3+, AM4 etc.

Graphics cards are named based on series xxx and model xxx. A 9xx series card is newer than a 7xx series card, 8 was skipped because it was an OEM series. There is no direct replacement scheme for them though. You cant tell just by model number what card is better, hence why reviews are a thing. Generally speaking, each new series has about a one-two setup up compared to the last. So a 970 is outperformed by a 1060, but is only marginally better than a 980.

Thank you for the in depth answer. This honestly makes a bunch of sense. I've been picking up some of all of this, it just seemed odd to me how everything kinda bounced around. So the only true way of knowing what is better than what, is plain old experience. I can honestly say I've taught myself a lot, and with some help from this site, I've come a long way. Thanks again for the response.

 

[caqde]

For Intel's LGA sockets the name comprises the amount of pins for the particular socket. Whereas AMD names there socket with more of a symbolic name for instance Socket AM4 (AMD's Mainstream socket), Socket TR4 (Highend Threadripper socket), and Socket SP3 (Server Socket).

GPU's names comprise a few components Generation and Performance within the generation. For Instance the GTX 780 is considered the Fastest 700 series card of the 700 series generation. Normally this would be succeeded by an 800 series but that was skipped over for some reason. AMD's side also follows a similar naming scheme RX 480 -> RX 580. From these schemes the only real information you can gather from the performance between one generation to another is that for example the GTX 780 is likely faster than the GTX 680. How much? Well that you would need to look up as generational performance differences can be as small as a couple of percentage points to as huge as 50%+.

Although it should be noted that both AMD and Nvidia have another subset of cards under a different naming scheme for the highend. Nvidia has their Titan cards whose naming scheme is anyone's guess. since every generation is named Titan (Something) the current one being Titan V. AMD has had two recent cards the first cards were named Fury the fastest cards in the 2x0/3x0 generation, and the recent Vega 56/64 cards which are the fastest cards of the 4x0/5x0 generation.

And finally Windows 9 was skipped due to a coding issue. When windows 9x series was out application would look for Windows 9* (* being any character) so if Microsoft named the OS Windows 9 and decided to make it 9.0 in code any application looking to see if a user was using Windows 9x would think Windows 9.0 was part of that line of OS's. Obviously this would be bad so they decided to use Windows 10.