I will agree that the vast majority of people in hardware forums don't have the slightest idea what they're talking about, either in they don't understand how a specific piece of hardware works, or they don't take all the circumstances into account.
People who are only interested in synthetic benchmark performance could care less about the real world performance of the product. I was bordering on obsession with hardware development and whether AMD or intel wore the performance crown until Intel's quad core QX6850 came out.
At the time Amd's top model chips were the Athlon 6000 x2 and the 6400 black edition (running 3.0ghz and 3.2ghz) As i was tired of hearing all the intel fanboys rant about how monsterous the QX6850 was and how screwed AMD was i actually did the math in performance comparison.
Core 2 Extreme QX6850 Athlon x2 6000 % Difference
Core Kentsfield Windsor
CPU Freq 3000mhz 3000mhz
FSB/HTT 333mhz 200mhz
Ram Spd 800mhz 750mhz Intel 16% faster
# of cores 4 (2x2) 2 (2x1) Intel 50% more
L1 Cache 64x64KB 128x128KB Amd 50% more L1
L2 Cache 2x4MB 2x1MB Intel 75% more L2
Mem Ctr Motherboard On Die
Fab Tech 65nm 90nm AMD 27.78% larger die
Die Size 286mmSq 230mmSq
Transistors 582million 227.4million
TDP Rating 130W 125 Intel 3.85% More W
Power Consumption
Idle 124W 96W Intel 22.59% More Pwr
3DM06 Cpu Test 2 225 210W Intel 6.67% More Pwr
Price $1499 $170 Intel Costs 88.66% More
Benchmarks
PCMark 05 V 1.2
Cpu 9679 6158 Intel performs 36.38% Better
Memory 4510 4153 Intel Performs 7.92% Better
Sandra XI
Arithmetic ALU 55945 21938 Intel Performs 60.79% better
Arithmetic MFLOPS 38712 18544 Intel performs 52.10% better
Memory Integer 6389 8600 AMD Performs 25.71% Better
Mem Floating Pt 6389 8597 AMD performs 25.69% Better
3D Mark 06 v1.1
All 3Dmark, Games &
@ 1280x1024 32bit
CPU 4346 2231 Intel performs 48.67% Better
Graphics 11765 10182 Intel performs 13.46% better
Prey 124FPS 107FPS Intel performs 13.71% better
Quake 4 132.8FPS 105FPS Intel performs 20.94% better
Serious Sam 2 167.5FPS 152.1FPS Intel performs 09.20% better
Warhammer 51.2FPS 32.5FPS Intel Performs 36.53% Better
Supreme Commander 59.0FPS 37.5FPS Intel performs 36.45% Better
Unreal Tourn '04 91.9FPS 79.9Fps Intel Performs 13.17% Better
So to recap, the QX6850 has
twice as many cores
4 times the L2 Cache
16% memory speed advantage
65nm core compared to 90nm core
Consumes more power, without having the on die memory controller the AMD does
9x the cost, and max gaming performance gain of 36%
All cpu benchmarks were from THG interactive cpu charts, power consumption i found in another tomshardware article.
Have alot more data compared but as i don't recall the link to original post and it's really OT ill just post that bit. Just illustrates my point of how much people will omit when they want to declare victory.
But "informed gaming hobbyist" is a bit of an oxymoron, if you'll recall something like 70% of gamers favored the P4 back when it was intel's finest. They're also the group of people that are ready to drop $3000+ on a new computer every 6 months, or if not a completly new rig, $1500+ on an SLI/Xfire setup. Informed gamers are hardware/overcloking enthusiasts first and foremost, gaming is an afterthought.
As for critizing hardware companies, it depends on the comment as to if it is immature or not. Constuctive criticisms are hardly immature as AMD/ATI, intel and nvidia actually pay people to not only research hardware forums, but intel actually pays people to shamelessly promote their hardware and bash any and all cometition. I'm sure it's common place among the major hardware companies but intel is the only one i know of to be proven guilty of the practice.
However your comment on the 10ghz by 2010 not happening, is wrong. Well, i suppose it would depend on the context of the comment, but either way 10ghz has been done, and doubled. IBM i believe was the company that tested a 20ghz cpu, air cooled and did so using normal fab production. My uncle who is actually a microprocessor engineer and has dealings with all the formentioned companies told me of this close to two years ago.
It's not about what can be done, it's about what is practical and economical. No software around would need anything near that fast, and the production cost would leave no market for it anyway.
As for the thread topic at hand...IGP isn't an if, but a when, much like intel implimenting an IMC. As for the gpu, i don't know about intel but look at AMD's roadmap, they aren't just researching it, they're testing it and banking on it.
Yes it is going to impact ATI and nvidia, but obviously in different ways...since ATI...is AMD.
Its not going to be a question of GPU or CPU, it's going to be a question of how many cores are gpu dedicated and how many are cpu dedicated.
It will no longer be a question of PCI, PCI-E or PCI-E 2.0, but which socket on the motherboard will i use.
Eventually it won't even be a question of having to decide between a gpu/cpu config, it will be just be a bios option of mPU #1- GPU or CPU. The graphics, general computation, and memory are going to be in a single package and socket based within the next 5 years. It's just a matter of the Fab process getting there. It's not going to kill gpu companies, so long as they adapt, because discrete gpu add-in cards aren't just going away, performance cards are as well.
If you look at the newer corporate PC's, they are micro-atx. Which puts the computer case about the size of a mid-range laptop but about 3x the thickness. Intel igp boards don't allow for much more than win 2000, or Xp with 16bit color. It's a fair assumption that corporations don't upgrade to vista not just because the OS would be a huge cost, but in order to run it would require buying thousands of new desktops, which would also have the added cost of higher power consumption.
AMD's IGP board costs Around $100, capable of playing blu-ray HD with a $35-40 1.8ghz processor, and running vista with all the shiny GUI features. Add in generic ram cost can get 1 Gig DDR2 800mhz sticks for $30, and a 250gig Sata drive for $50. $220 for a vista capable HTPC.
No self respecting hardware geek would proud of it. But i'm willing to bet that...oh i don't know 80-90% of computer users would be.
As for those who buy desktop under $1000 hoping for gaming performance yes, that's deluded. They're paying $1000 for $350-450 hardware and the rest is software they'll never touch.
But if you can't build a gaming rig for under $1000 you either don't know that much about hardware, don't know how to overclock or don't know when to draw the line.
I still have a DFI LP CFX3200 939, 4400 toledo core x2 rig that plays crysis in 1280x1024 with all setting maxed and maintains a minimum of 25fps, avg 35 with a HD2900xt gfx card. 4 gigs ddr runing 640mhz @ 2.5-2-2-8 and cpu OCed from 2.2 stock to 3.68ghz on air cooling. 2x18gig 15k rpm scsi in mirriored Raid, and 2x74gig 10k rpm scsi in mirriored raid. Cost of what i originally paid for the old hardware + the 2900xt is still only $980. At the time i originally built it i got a x1800xtx that cost $190 when it was the latest and greatest card around total cost was $790.