RussianSensation
Elite Member
- Sep 5, 2003
- 19,458
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If AMD is 10% behind NVIDIA performance but it costs 10-15% less, "big win", "AMD is competitive", "GTX580 is an overpriced turd", etc.
But in CPU land it seems to be different.
It is different. Every 15-18 months, GPU performance will increase 50-75% or even more. So why pay $200 more for a GTX580 for 15% more performance when in 6-8 months you'll be able to sell your old card and reinvest that "$200 saved" into a card 50%-75% faster?
On the CPU side, the market is totally different:
1) We use a CPU daily for tasks outside of games. Not everyone plays games every day, but every time you use a computer, you use a CPU.
2) We buy a CPU + Mobo and keep it for 2-3 years. In that time we will have gone though 2-3 GPUs. So an extra $75-100 spent on a faster CPU works out to about $23-35 a year in total, but we use CPU for every day tasks and not just for gaming. Also, going with a faster CPU ensures no CPU bottlenecking.
3) It takes 2 years+ before we see 10-20% performance increases in IPC on the CPU. So if you buy a $225 CPU with the fastest IPC today, you know for a fact that in 6 months from now nothing will come out that will really blow its doors away like a new generation of GPUs. So it's more of an "investment" than buying GPUs is. You buy it and forget about it for 2-3 years.
4) In a situation when you build a brand new desktop for $700, spending $100 extra on an Intel setup is 14% more expensive. But even if you get 10% more performance, that isn't an unreasonable price increase. Of course since Phenom II, AMD has been behind by way more than 10% every single year.
If Bulldozer is within 10% of Sandy Bridge and costs 10% less, that's much better then what Phenom II offers today. Right now AMD is pretty much giving away the X6 for < $200 and Microcenter even gives you $10 mobos and still hardly anyone cares.