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The Core Architecture in the mid 2000's was such an incredible shot back to the top. I remember seeing the benchmarks absolutely dominate AMD on every level, po
by thisisnico 6y ago
The Core Architecture in the mid 2000's was such an incredible shot back to the top. I remember seeing the benchmarks absolutely dominate AMD on every level, power, performance, TDP, Cost, etc. etc. This is almost immediately after Athlon 64 and the Athlon 64X2 started to gain market share, spanking Intel's Pentium 4 at the time. IIRC Intel ended up dropping the Prescott architecture, moving to the Pentium M architecture for development of the Core CPU's. Moving away from chasing max frequencies, and instead looking at IPC. Then Nehalem Dropped, (The first Core i CPU's) making the gap even larger. Q6600, Quad Core, Low power, decent cost. That was the CPU to have at the time. I miss the days reading about all of this.
- ReptileMan 6y agoAnd you could overclock them almost 50% and at factory speeds they didn't need a fan, just a heatsink. Those were the days.
- nwmcsween 6y agoThis just puts into perspective how stagnate cpus have been, ~14 years and we are just starting to move to more than 4 core processors on prosumer systems.
- thisisnico 6y agoSad really. I was so passionate about hardware then. I lost interest because the innovation just dropped off a cliff. We were nearly exponential before the Core i series. Interestingly during that period Servers have had many-core CPU's. It just seems that Intel hasn't had a reason to push the envelope on the consumer side.
- wbl 6y agoPour one out for Denard scaling.
- kilburn 6y agoTo be fair, the move started a while back (arguably in 2017 with the introduction of the Ryzen CPUs). For instance, Steam's hardware report indicates that 1/3 of their install base already has 6 cores or more [1]. [1] https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/ https://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/cpus/
- zahrc 6y agoBefore Ryzen even, FX-6300 and -8350 series (6-core and 8-core respectively) were used heavily in cheap pre-builts and beginner PC bulding during early 2010+
- cpeterso 6y agoMozilla's Firefox Hardware Report shows that most Firefox users (55%) still have only two cores! Four cores is slowly climbing at 34%. Firefox users surely have older hardware than Steam gamers, but it's another data point showing just how slowly hardware turns over. https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware#goto-os-and-architecture https://data.firefox.com/dashboard/hardware#goto-os-and-arch...
- CPAhem 6y agoThat's monopoly power for you. Right now there's competition to Intel again which means processors will probably start getting much faster again. That's one of the few great things about capitalism - competition drives innovation.
- swiftcoder 6y ago> That's one of the few great things about capitalism - competition drives innovation. Just so long as the aforementioned monopolies don't choke out competition. Sadly, we seem to end up with a lot of pseudo-monopolies in the tech industry. I wonder how much more competition we could have with strict monopolies regulation on acquisitions and mergers?
- imtringued 6y agoIf you let companies acquire close to 100% market share then monopolies are guaranteed to happen because one company is always more cost efficient than two but with the obvious problem that monopolies don't act in the interest of consumers. Limits on company size can definitively prevent monopolies.
- deleted 6y ago[deleted]
- dis-sys 6y agoI still have my Q6600, what an incredible processor at its time.
- xattt 6y agoAt that time, Intel had a lead with the Tualatin microarchitecture on the PIII. This was developed into the Pentium M and Core. As far as I can tell, they don’t really have anything of that sort on the market right now that they could “evolve” into something new.
- l33tman 6y agoI retired my Q6600 a few weeks ago, because CyberPunk 2077 couldn't run on it (lacking AVX instructions). Worked fine up until then in my gaming rig :) I still have my Core2 Duo in my HTPC... it's starting to feel doggy though.