Following the CPU market has lost it's excitement for me

[zinfamous]

That's honestly what people always say when AMD is on the eve of new product launches.



Interesting that he didn't even bother to stick around for its birth. He left before any products based on the core taped out.



Like what? Also don't forget, Pascal has been on the market for nearly a year (including the HBM2-packing GP100 for datacenter) while Vega is still a product that AMD plans to tease/preview at CES.



How on earth can you conclude any of this? Laziness of NVIDIA and Intel? Ahead of both of them? These are assertions that require proof.



I must have missed the previews of Zen sanctioned by AMD, published by independent tech review sites. Could you link please?



Those rumors don't even make any sense. Kaby Lake is available now and it is the fastest gaming CPU on the planet. Broadwell-E has been available in 6, 8, and 10 core configs since May of 2016, and we will soon see Skylake-X which will have up to 10 cores, a new PCH, 14nm+ process, and additional L2$ over SKL/KBL mainstream which ought to help in a number of workloads like gaming. Coming around the same time as Zen.

For good measure, Intel is even throwing in a Kaby Lake-X for the HEDT platform which will probably clock like a banshee, come with a soldered IHS, and give people more reason than ever to choose HEDT.



Seriously, Intel looks like it is in a strong position. Its Kaby Lake SoCs will mainly be competing against Bristol Ridge, and in HEDT Intel has Broadwell-E today (up to 10 cores) and Skylake-X coming not too long after Zen, also packing up to 10 cores, and a bunch of other improvements.

AMD is building better products than it previously had (that's what you're supposed to do), but to assert that Intel has just been sitting there doing nothing when it is the company that has been consistently delivering new products to the enthusiast market while AMD continued to sell 2012 FX chips just doesn't make any sense.

Right, we won't know what Zen or Vega bring until at least tomorrow but certainly not until a few months from now when we start seeing reviews. I'm not saying Intel is weak or that they are releasing crappier products (we can't say either way right now--and I expect Intel to at least beat AMD at the absolute worst because they have a more mature design with 14nm), but you have to look at what Intel has done over nearly 10 years of no competition, with their astronomical budget, and what AMD has done with nearly 1/10th the investment from their last release up until Zen. Intel has been lazy because they can be. Lazy doesn't mean they release inferior products, it's just that nothing exciting has come from them for some time. Eww! A new DRM codec whatsit embedded in KL only! yeah, that's exactly what consumers want to see. LoL, I remember Sony getting a lot of flack for such practices.

Even without any of us seeing a slew of new benchmarks, you have to admit that we have seen so far, legitimately, is nothing short of staggering. AMD doing what it is doing, at their cost of entry, is actually significantly more exciting than Intel releasing incremental (if that) updates to their products. KL is fine and all, but it isn't going to set the world on fire for a Skylake owner and not likely in the public's perception if AMD delivers in both performance and price. And that's the point of this thread: maybe this is actually an exciting time...up until the next 2 months, anyway, once we know what we will know. But, we kinda see where Intel is going for the next 3 years considering what KL is compared to SL. They seem pretty locked in there. AMD seems to have made an astronomical leap in performance and efficiency, while introducing some new design to x86--oh, and mainstream 6-8c chips this year.

Remember how exciting times were when we hit 1 ghz and when we hit consumer x86-64 designs and the competition that begat? Yeah, exciting times....maybe.

 

[RichUK]

Kaby Lake is just not worthy of being classified as a new generation, that's the simple fact.

 

[zinfamous]

Kaby Lake is just not worthy of being classified as a new generation, that's the simple fact.

agreed, and you like your chip, right?

It's the chip you get if you are looking for a real upgrade (say I want to upgrade my Xeon e3 1231), but not if you feel you need to upgrade from Skylake, or certainly not 6700K. It just isn't worth it. I know--techforum where people expect to be upgrading once or twice per year (though plenty have admitted here time and again that they stopped doing that), this seems like the poorest opportunity to do so in many years if you are on Intel platform.

Say you are on Haswell like myself--I can now consider KL or Zen for a real upgrade path. Well, maybe. I don't know if I really need to upgrade that CPU, but maybe I will. dunno.

 

[RichUK]

agreed, and you like your chip, right?

It's the chip you get if you are looking for a real upgrade (say I want to upgrade my Xeon e3 1231), but not if you feel you need to upgrade from Skylake, or certainly not 6700K. It just isn't worth it. I know--techforum where people expect to be upgrading once or twice per year (though plenty have admitted here time and again that they stopped doing that), this seems like the poorest opportunity to do so in many years if you are on Intel platform.

Say you are on Haswell like myself--I can now consider KL or Zen for a real upgrade path. Well, maybe. I don't know if I really need to upgrade that CPU, but maybe I will. dunno.

The 7700k is a great processor, just not worth it when upgrading from a 6700k.

I came from an i3 6100, so the i7 7700k is a significant upgrade (breadth and depth) in comparison (especially when overclocked).