4 ms·

When AMD released a competitive GPU, nVidia released a new GPU with chips that had been sitting in a warehouse for more than 6 months. Competition is necessary.

bhouston 8y ago
Yeah, Volta should have been ready to ship in volume like 6 months ago. Now I am not completely sure they are just sitting in a warehouse though. I understand Volta is currently in mass production and will launch around July/August.
- twtw 8y ago
  All the current rumors and info I've seen indicate that Volta will never be in a consumer graphics card, so it has already launched (tesla v100 was available ~July 2017).
  - bhouston 8y ago
    I was referring to Volta launching in mainstream GeForce GPU line. I understand it is launching soon.
twtw 8y ago
could you specify what generation you are talking about? There have been a lot of GPUs.
ashleyn 8y ago
I bought a Sandy Bridge CPU in 2011. 4 cores, 8 threads, 3.0 ghz. Last year I went looking through consumer-class CPUs looking to upgrade. They are more or less all a very unimpressive 4 core, 8 thread, 3.0 ghz. Maybe they have a tiny bit more cache. There is absolutely no reason to upgrade. Progress on consumer-class CPUs this decade has been utterly anemic. The only one I've seriously been wowed by is the Ryzen Threadripper. Now all of a sudden, Intel is readying better CPUs. Entirely coincidental, I'm sure.
- krylon 8y ago
  > They are more or less all a very unimpressive 4 core, 8 thread, 3.0 ghz. Maybe they have a tiny bit more cache. There is absolutely no reason to upgrade. In a way, that was good thing, though. For the first time in my memory, a five-year-old PC is not a piece of junk I am just too lazy to get rid off, but a machine fully capable running current software (at least after install more RAM and an SSD). (Within reasonable limits, of course, I am not talking about high end games or such.) The fact that CPUs did not get faster (not much, at least) also meant that software could not afford to get slower, which greatly extended the useful lifespans of older machines.
  - deleted 8y ago
    [deleted]
  - cdelsolar 8y ago
    Yeah, I'm on my 2013 Macbook Pro right now and it still runs like a dream (within reason). I don't see myself changing it anytime soon.
- ajross 8y ago
  That 2600K you bought in 2011 was a premium part. The ones you're looking at now are low end. If you look in the same price range you find 6-core Coffee Lake CPUs at 4.4GHz, which has 50% more cache, about 2x the GPU performance, maybe 15% better IPC on typical workloads, and draws about 30% less power under load. No, it's not the mid 90's anymore where we were tripling performance every time we upgraded. There's still progress.
- balls187 8y ago
  How are you ascertaining that there is no reason to upgrade? I went from a Nehalem i7 3.20GHz extreme hex core, to a kabylake i7 7700k 4-core, and it's a night and day difference. In every one of my use cases my 7700k outperforms the older CPU.
  - WhiteOwlLion 8y ago
    Depends what you are doing and whether the upgrade justifies the cost and productivity gain. I just bought several i5 quad core 3.2Ghz Dell Optiplex 3010 for our church for $35 ea. They run Windows 10 and LibreOffice just fine on a HDD. Now, if I'm crunching for distributed computing, I might want that quad XEON 24-core 1U server off eBay instead. Just depends on your workload and use case.

bhouston 8y ago

Yeah, Volta should have been ready to ship in volume like 6 months ago. Now I am not completely sure they are just sitting in a warehouse though. I understand Volta is currently in mass production and will launch around July/August.

twtw 8y ago
All the current rumors and info I've seen indicate that Volta will never be in a consumer graphics card, so it has already launched (tesla v100 was available ~July 2017).
- bhouston 8y ago
  I was referring to Volta launching in mainstream GeForce GPU line. I understand it is launching soon.

twtw 8y ago

could you specify what generation you are talking about? There have been a lot of GPUs.

ashleyn 8y ago

I bought a Sandy Bridge CPU in 2011. 4 cores, 8 threads, 3.0 ghz. Last year I went looking through consumer-class CPUs looking to upgrade. They are more or less all a very unimpressive 4 core, 8 thread, 3.0 ghz. Maybe they have a tiny bit more cache. There is absolutely no reason to upgrade. Progress on consumer-class CPUs this decade has been utterly anemic. The only one I've seriously been wowed by is the Ryzen Threadripper. Now all of a sudden, Intel is readying better CPUs. Entirely coincidental, I'm sure.

krylon 8y ago
> They are more or less all a very unimpressive 4 core, 8 thread, 3.0 ghz. Maybe they have a tiny bit more cache. There is absolutely no reason to upgrade. In a way, that was good thing, though. For the first time in my memory, a five-year-old PC is not a piece of junk I am just too lazy to get rid off, but a machine fully capable running current software (at least after install more RAM and an SSD). (Within reasonable limits, of course, I am not talking about high end games or such.) The fact that CPUs did not get faster (not much, at least) also meant that software could not afford to get slower, which greatly extended the useful lifespans of older machines.
- deleted 8y ago
  [deleted]
- cdelsolar 8y ago
  Yeah, I'm on my 2013 Macbook Pro right now and it still runs like a dream (within reason). I don't see myself changing it anytime soon.
ajross 8y ago
That 2600K you bought in 2011 was a premium part. The ones you're looking at now are low end. If you look in the same price range you find 6-core Coffee Lake CPUs at 4.4GHz, which has 50% more cache, about 2x the GPU performance, maybe 15% better IPC on typical workloads, and draws about 30% less power under load. No, it's not the mid 90's anymore where we were tripling performance every time we upgraded. There's still progress.
balls187 8y ago
How are you ascertaining that there is no reason to upgrade? I went from a Nehalem i7 3.20GHz extreme hex core, to a kabylake i7 7700k 4-core, and it's a night and day difference. In every one of my use cases my 7700k outperforms the older CPU.
- WhiteOwlLion 8y ago
  Depends what you are doing and whether the upgrade justifies the cost and productivity gain. I just bought several i5 quad core 3.2Ghz Dell Optiplex 3010 for our church for $35 ea. They run Windows 10 and LibreOffice just fine on a HDD. Now, if I'm crunching for distributed computing, I might want that quad XEON 24-core 1U server off eBay instead. Just depends on your workload and use case.