What will cause a $100 core i5 to happen?

[john5220]

someone on this site once told me that AMD is the real evil here. And that it is they AMD who never wanted to sell a CPU for under $300 and it was intel who saved the day and helped out the poor folks.

Is there any truth to this? I am not old enough to remember any of that. I always taught intel was the most expensive because a friend of mine said that intel is greedy. But I dunno,

AMD might do the same kinda like how 7850K is priced so high since intel has nothing that competes with the 7850K, you would need Discrete GPU to compete.

 

[Yuriman]

I wouldn't call AMD evil, just often mismanaged. There were some cases of corporate corruption, but the company has survived. They have always been smaller than Intel, and have often used everything they can to try and close the income gap. When they had faster CPUs, they priced them to the sky. AMD's single core FX chips were over $1000 before Intel released Core2Duo and brought things back down to a reasonable level.

Arguably the 7850K does have a niche, but I'm sure that AMD found they could make more profit overall by selling them cheaper, as people just weren't buying them.

EDIT: Intel has done some of the same things, of course. Back in the early 2000's, Intel was using some anticompetitive practices to prevent companies like Dell from moving over to Athlon64 processors. They were sued for it and had to pay damages but it's hard to say if it made any real difference in the long run, considering how much more R&D was going on at Intel. There were also some extreme edition Pentium 4's that were rather excessively priced. More recently, Intel has not had to compete with AMD and thus have not been doing great evils or price gouging.

 

[2is]

Its not about making profit, its about paying for R&D.

For an i5 to cost 100$, it would be because its only worth 100$ performance wise.

But its a pee in the pants solution. You get cheaper CPUs now, you get slower CPUs in the future. (Less R&D and the situation AMD is in.)

It's always about making profit.

 

[tential]

More beneficial than all these threads you're making John5220. I think you should instead take a basic economics course.

You might then understand why companies price things the way they do.

Edit: You could read:
http://www.amazon.com/Economics-One-Lesson-Shortest-Understand/dp/0517548232

You can find it for free in a couple of places I believe (legally).

Simple version: I would purchase 1 i5 at $100. I would purchase 1 i5 at $200. I would purchase 1 i5 at $250. So why in gods name would intel price it at $100 and lose out on a potential $150 dollars if I would still purchase it at $250?

 

[john5220]

I wouldn't call AMD evil, just often mismanaged. There were some cases of corporate corruption, but the company has survived. They have always been smaller than Intel, and have often used everything they can to try and close the income gap. When they had faster CPUs, they priced them to the sky. AMD's single core FX chips were over $1000 before Intel released Core2Duo and brought things back down to a reasonable level.

Arguably the 7850K does have a niche, but I'm sure that AMD found they could make more profit overall by selling them cheaper, as people just weren't buying them.

EDIT: Intel has done some of the same things, of course. Back in the early 2000's, Intel was using some anticompetitive practices to prevent companies like Dell from moving over to Athlon64 processors. They were sued for it and had to pay damages but it's hard to say if it made any real difference in the long run, considering how much more R&D was going on at Intel. There were also some extreme edition Pentium 4's that were rather excessively priced. More recently, Intel has not had to compete with AMD and thus have not been doing great evils or price gouging.

wow thanks for clearing it up dude thats some nice history and info there.

I do hear people say that once upon a time AMD used to be King and would often beat intel on performance crown.

Its pretty hard for me to imagine such a thing. When i think AMD now I think so far behind, even if I try I cannot for whatever reason see AMD was ever better than Intel. I just cannot see AMD having a CPU that outperforms intel in Speed and Power consumption.
I did however read up on Pentium D and Athlon X2 with intel stealing inside documents from AMD they had an inside guy there and as such they were able to create the core architecture. But I never owned those stuff, I started building computers at the time of Phenom II

I am unfortunately not old enough to have known or remembered such things as the 1GHZ AMD CPU or Pentium 3. So its always nice to hear stories about these things from people.

But you are so right intel kinda has a monopoly right now especially on high end but they choose not to over price anything for reasons unknown to me. 6 core Devils canyon for $380~ not long ago something like that would have cost nothing less than $1000

 

[Yuriman]

I doubt Core was based off of anything AMD did. Intel branched their development after Pentium 3, with the low power, efficient Pentium 3 design being improved in efficiency for notebooks (called Pentium-M and later Core and Core Duo), and the high power Pentium 4 being scaled up for desktops. After a while, Intel binned the Pentium 4 architecture and brought Core to the desktop.

You might have a fun time reading some of these old articles:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1101

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1098

http://www.anandtech.com/show/1164

Before Athlon64, Pentium 4's were often faster but also considerably more expensive than AMD's chips, and AMD's pricing didn't seem to bother Intel. I remember picking up an Athlon XP 1700+ for ~$45 and overclocking it to near the (stock) performance of Intel's flagship Pentium 4, which I remember being in the $2-300 range. A64 changed that, being considerably faster per clock and drawing less energy than Intel's chip, but AMD's prices went up dramatically, charging a premium over Intel's for premium performance.

 

[Yuriman]

Thinking back on it, some AMD chips I owned were:

K6-3 400 - let me get more life out of my socket 7 PC
Athlon 550 - ran hot, had stability problems
Duron 950 - great cheap chip
Tbird 1350 (?) - ran hot, didn't overclock well
Athlon XP 1600+ - first generation Athlon XP, great performance but poor overclocking
Athlon XP 1700+ & 1800+ tbred B - revision 2 of second generation XP chips, amazing overclockers
Mobile Barton 2500+ - cool chip with excellent performance
Athlon64 2800+ - first socket 754 chip, poor overclocker and ran hot but great performance, somewhat expensive
Athlon64 3000+ - first socket 939 chip, great performance, decent overclocker
Athlon64 x2 3800+ - great overclocker, first real dual core
Opteron 165 - possibly the most insane overclocking chip of all time, except for maybe some Pentium II based Celerons, but Core was out and Intel was pulling ahead

After than 165 I moved to a Core2 quad in my primary PC and haven't been compelled by the value of any of AMD's chips since. I have an APU in the living room, but that was mostly curiosity. Largely, I think it's because in the past you could get competitive single threaded performance from AMD's chips at a fraction of the price, since there was only one core, or a dual core of comparable or better performance, with lower power draw, for a similar price. These days, there's no way a $45 AMD chip will have anywhere near the single- or multithreaded performance of a $300 i7. The cost gap has closed.

 

[TheELF]

But you are so right intel kinda has a monopoly right now especially on high end but they choose not to over price anything for reasons unknown to me.

Intel makes most of its money from very big companies that have a fixed budged for replacing all of their PC's every few years.
So they never change their pricing and their clients are happy about spending the same amount and getting better hardware,without having to do research or thinking about it too much.

 

[john5220]

thanks Yuriman your it seems I have enjoyed your lectures a lot more than my professor at school.

Thats some pretty nice history there will surely read up on the links.

You guys sure are lucky to have been around in those golden age. I just hope AMD does not go the way of the dodo. They seem like a nice company still devoted to our X86 needs. For what its worth their FX 6300 over clocked from what I read is a pretty decent chip at a much cheaper price than intel's i3

 

[Arachnotronic]

thanks
You guys sure are lucky to have been around in those golden age. I just hope AMD does not go the way of the dodo. They seem like a nice company still devoted to our X86 needs. For what its worth their FX 6300 over clocked from what I read is a pretty decent chip at a much cheaper price than intel's i3

There's no such thing as a "nice" company. AMD, just like "evil" Intel, is out to maximize profits for its shareholders -- Intel just happens to be far better at its job than AMD is.

Right now, AMD's product lineup is not very competitive, so it needs to price aggressively to maintain share. I guarantee you that if AMD had the better product than Intel, Intel would seem like the "nice" guy trying to sell not-as-competitive product for cheaper.

 

[john5220]

^ yeah I think you are right, reminds me of a friend who used to preach how Evil AMD was when they had the performance crown with Athlon X2 6000+ because it was priced soo expensive. And today he claims how intel is Evil because a quad core intel is $200 while a 6 core AMD is $89

 

[Erenhardt]

Revolution in directX would do.

The perception of amd not being able to compete with intel is a bit distorted by the software situation - games to be more precise.

Where intel is a lot faster is performance in games. If we take applications that make use of all the CPU processing power the performance of amd fx8350 is about that of i7 3770:

.
Intel have better efficiency then amd thanks to fab process but performance is quite close.

If suddenly games start to make good use of the CPUs, then we may get i5 for $100.

 

[Yuriman]

Revolution in directX would do.

The perception of amd not being able to compete with intel is a bit distorted by the software situation - games to be more precise.

Where intel is a lot faster is performance in games. If we take applications that make use of all the CPU processing power the performance of amd fx8350 is about that of i7 3770:

.
Intel have better efficiency then amd thanks to fab process but performance is quite close.

If suddenly games start to make good use of the CPUs, then we may get i5 for $100.

In terms of raw performance, yes. AMD would need to refresh the platform and reduce power usage too, but there are definitely some programs that run much faster on an AMD chips than a similarly priced Intel one right now.

If games suddenly started using 8 cores, I bet we'd see the FX chips go up $100, rather than Intel's go down.

 

[john5220]

Can we expect games to start using 8 cores by the next 3 years?

PS4 bring a 8 core AMD CPU that is and xbox one same thing.

I am actually surprised that SONY went from CELL 7 Core CPU to a 8 CORE AMD CPU it feels like if they didn't even need to bother changing or upgrading the CPU.

 

[Yuriman]

Cell didn't have 7 cores in the same way a modern Intel or AMD processor has cores. As I understand it, it had one core capable of running general code, and 6 small coprocessors that specific tasks could be offloaded onto. I've read that it was a nightmare to program for. Additionally, that one core was a 2005 core. Although you may have the perception that you can hold onto a processor for x years so long as it has enough cores, it's not realistic. Even if you had 8 cores from 2005, you'd still end up with a slideshow trying to play Starcraft 2, which is almost 5 years old at this point. A single modern core has far more throughput than Cell's 7 "cores" combined.

As for when games will start to use more cores, that's up for debate. Problem is, things don't automatically get better over time. In order to build a game engine that is very multithreaded, you have to throw a lot of time and money at it. If all game budgets go up (and thus game costs go up), you're likely to see them run better on more cores. Games with the same budgets as those today will probably not.

EDIT: In other words, sometimes an expensive processor allows you to have cheap software.

EDIT2: Upon consideration, games have already become vastly parallel. The part that can be run on many cores tends to be offloaded onto a card that has many dedicated cores (GPU), and the code that is necessarily single-threaded will tend to stay on the CPU. Having more CPUs seems somewhat counterproductive so long as the code is easily parallelized can be offloaded to the GPU.

 

[BigDaveX]

Can we expect games to start using 8 cores by the next 3 years?

Considering the PS4 and Xbox One only have 6 (I think) cores available to game developers, probably not. And even if enough games started making use of 6 CPU-heavy threads to enough of an extent that FX could consistently beat the current quad-core i7s, Intel could just take their usual approach of throwing more silicon at the problem, and bring 6-core dies to their mainstream socket.

In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if at some point in the next few years Intel's CPU line-up looks something like this:

Celeron - Dual Core
Pentium - Dual Core with Hyper-Threading
Core i3 - Quad Core
Core i5 - Quad Core with Hyper-Threading
Core i7 (mainstream) - 6 Core with Hyper-Threading
Core i7 (HEDT) - 8+ Core with Hyper-Threading

 

[witeken]

Interesting.. I think we should be seeing cheaper intel quad core CPUs

I am not too impressed with the current offerings from sandy bridge to haswell.

I was far more impressed with
Nehalem to Sandy Bridge performance Jump in CPU performance

Ever since then it has never been the same anymore.

Obviously because Intel is dealing with the ARM problem. They have to make sure the PC doesn't die like people say, so they must create good laptops, all-in-ones, NUCs, USB PCs, ultrabooks and fanless systems, etc.; from $199 to $1999.

If you want high performance, then Intel will be happy to let you pay for their R&D and give you quadcore or better for the money; Devils's Canyon and Haswell-E.

 

[TheELF]

Considering the PS4 and Xbox One only have 6 (I think) cores available to game developers, probably not. And even if enough games started making use of 6 CPU-heavy threads to enough of an extent that FX could consistently beat the current quad-core i7s

It doesn't work like this,6(or 8) "solid" ,CPU-heavy threads as you put it, will always perform very bad for games,on parallel workloads where there is no decision making they work great , modern ps4/xbox games are written with as many small threads as possible,that way if the game needs data from a certain thread it does not need to wait for the "solid" thread to cycle through until its the turn of that function,it can just call the thread that represent this function and get the data immediately,well faster anyway.
Look at mordor
And here is an article about how ps4 games are coded

 

[jhu]

If you want high performance, then Intel will be happy to let you pay for their R&D and give you quadcore or better for the money; Devils's Canyon and Haswell-E.

That's what HP was doing for the past 15+ years. Then they gave up.

 

[tential]

Can we expect games to start using 8 cores by the next 3 years?

PS4 bring a 8 core AMD CPU that is and xbox one same thing.

I am actually surprised that SONY went from CELL 7 Core CPU to a 8 CORE AMD CPU it feels like if they didn't even need to bother changing or upgrading the CPU.

You're thinking of this in such an extremely basic way that it's no wonder you're getting confused. It's not as simple as "7 core Cell CPU to 8 core AMD CPU" "They only added 1 core!".
It's a whole different architecture.
You're thinking of things on an "apples to apples" and almost none of the comparisons you're making are apples to apples.

Like I already said before, you really need to do some reading on what you're talking about. You have a very weak grasp on how markets work which I recommended you a book on and you probably want to do some basic reading on CPU design too.

 

[386DX]

EDIT: Intel has done some of the same things, of course. Back in the early 2000's, Intel was using some anticompetitive practices to prevent companies like Dell from moving over to Athlon64 processors. They were sued for it and had to pay damages but it's hard to say if it made any real difference in the long run, considering how much more R&D was going on at Intel. There were also some extreme edition Pentium 4's that were rather excessively priced. More recently, Intel has not had to compete with AMD and thus have not been doing great evils or price gouging.

AMD never had any good in house R&D. Pre Athlon64 days there K5, K6 CPU weren't very good. The Athlon was a good chip at the time not because of some super in house R&D it was from the infusion of talent and licensing from other companies. The K5/K6 was so not competitive that AMD bought out NexGen who at the time had some really unique concepts in there CPU. AMD was also lucky they had license the EV Bus from DEC who at the time had very good performing CPUs and design. Unfortunately for DEC they folded, fortunately for AMD a lot of DEC's engineers went on to work for AMD and help design the Athlon. So to summarize AMD was very fortunate with the Athlon, they pretty much hit the jackpot getting talent from two company and licensed at the time a much wider bus architecture then Intel. After Athlon we all know what has happened to AMD.

 

[john5220]

Obviously because Intel is dealing with the ARM problem. They have to make sure the PC doesn't die like people say, so they must create good laptops, all-in-ones, NUCs, USB PCs, ultrabooks and fanless systems, etc.; from $199 to $1999.

If you want high performance, then Intel will be happy to let you pay for their R&D and give you quadcore or better for the money; Devils's Canyon and Haswell-E.

Intel has one problem with ARM and that is Qualcomm. At this point the only company that has any chance at Qualcomm is Samsung and even they are left in the dust.

Things are so bad that intel has decided to abandon the US market in favor of the Chinese market to play with that garbage chipset Mediatek.
Its a very scary situation when you think of the size of intel.

This is their fault really..

4G LTE is also taking over so an even bigger issue for intel.

The ARM Atom does not even support higher than 13MP camera. You need qualcomm for sony xperia Z2 20mp camera phones.

 

[john5220]

You're thinking of this in such an extremely basic way that it's no wonder you're getting confused. It's not as simple as "7 core Cell CPU to 8 core AMD CPU" "They only added 1 core!".
It's a whole different architecture.
You're thinking of things on an "apples to apples" and almost none of the comparisons you're making are apples to apples.

Like I already said before, you really need to do some reading on what you're talking about. You have a very weak grasp on how markets work which I recommended you a book on and you probably want to do some basic reading on CPU design too.

Hi I just started my BSc in Computer Engineering which features some economics and lots of CPU architecture + electrical engineering etc

We should start these courses in January. I am currently reading up on an information systems management book.

 

[ninaholic37]

It's already happened. Go check ebay.

Haha yes, I was going to say the same thing. I've been buying everything used for years, mostly to avoid the "16:9 touchscreen Windows 8" revolution entirely, and the cheaper prices for everything is just an added bonus.

 

[WittyRemark]

Apocalypse.