Since you never really said much in your original post, please do.
Intel was blindly pursuing clock speed at any cost. They no longer do that -- ergo, they have learned from their mistake.
They've done it before. A few years before that they were also counted out and standing in the shadow of Intel.
They certainly won't be doing it anytime soon. Steamroller, at best, can bring them close to Intel on a performance level, while still being woefully behind with power consumption. Excavator is allegedly working on the power consumption part, at the expense of clock speed.
Performance per watt went nowhere.
And when you look at Phenom II -> Zambezi -> Vishera, that average does come out to around the 8% number, considering that Bulldozer went backwards.
The fact is that TDP goes up very quickly when increasing the CPU frequency on IB. AMD A8-5800K is at 100 W, Intel 3770K is at 77W (and Haswell 4770K will be at 84 W). That gives Intel a 16-23 W advantage. Not much. And that's even with Intel being on 22 nm vs AMD at 32 nm!
The point is that Intel's shrinking their power usage while simultaneously increasing performance. It's silly to be complaining about Intel not going anywhere with performance, because they're making huge leaps in performance per watt. Intel's top-level power rating has changed -- why can't the performance junkies that are whining in this thread and everywhere else on the internet see this?
Ivy Bridge is an oddball in a rather long history of large gains in clock speed and performance. Claiming it's the end of the world based on one data point is ridiculous.
Also, AMD has an iGPU advantage compared to Intel. If Intel wants to catch up, it means the TDP of Intel CPUs will increase due to that (adding more GPU cores / EUs).
That has no bearing on the progress being made with their CPUs.
I've never said that performance is the only thing that matters. But it's the topic of this thread.
Regarding the OC comment I'm not really sure what you're point is. Since it's possible to OC, performance increases brought by CPU improvements do not matter?
It's about not being bound by Intel's TDP ratings. If Intel kept performance stagnant, but managed to drop power consumption by 75%, by the logic that's being thrown around here, they wouldn't be moving anywhere.
Yes, they are getting competition in that sector too. That does not mean they cannot get competition in other sectors at the same time.
Perhaps that's the problem for Intel. They are now getting competition on several fronts, and currently they seem to focus primarily on the ARM problem, so they are leaving the other flanks unprotected.
Worst case scenario, Intel has to adjust their price. They aren't going to hold onto those wide margins forever.
Facebook
Twitter