[citation][nom]notsleep[/nom]amd still around?! they should just stop making cpus and concentrate on graphic cards. they can't compete with intel with their piledriver line. they lag behind intel on die shrink. i honestly can't see them doing any better with their steamroller line either.[/citation]
[citation][nom]InvalidError[/nom]All the low-hanging performance improvement fruits have been picked. Clock rates using low-cost mass-production process and were responsible for the lions' share of the ~60%/year improvement we used to have 10-20 years ago have hit a brick wall at 3.5-4GHz for most of the past 10 years, out-of-order execution, branch prediction / speculative execution, prefetching, etc. have reached a point where making them any more accurate/efficient is becoming extremely expensive so there really isn't much left to improve on in a cost-effective manner.This is the burden of interactive desktop applications being largely single-threaded and thus heavily reliant on single-threaded throughput.In the server space, many CPU vendors sacrifice single-threaded ILP in favor of TLP. This allows them to use much simpler/shorter out-of-order queues per thread, forgo speculative execution (branch prediction) and all the extra complexity that comes with those so they can put more resources into increasing SMT throughput by multiplexing 4-8 instruction streams per core, basically hyperthreading on steroids.In other words, the desktop PC is stuck on a brick wall until desktop applications start making meaningful use of multi-threading. This is where Intel's recent interest and patent in artificial vision as an alternate input method comes in - something to make even the most trivial tasks gobble up a few cores if people want to use it.[/citation]
This is a great post, thank you. Except for new instructions that Intel releases secretly with new cpus, AMD has a very good chance of matching Intel's performance with its upcoming Steamroller core design. Which is not even AMDs final step towards Fusion. AMD's plans are clear, but how Intel plans to improve going forward is unclear. Likely they will follow AMD's path.