Used to be the day that every 3 years I would be ready to take the plunge and upgrade my main desktop rig (mo' powa! Arr Arr Arr). This August, with the coming of Skylake, I do not feel any urge. It appears the i7-3770 has been ageing well. The i7-4770 is not much improvement (maybe 5%) and Skylake is for the ULV crowd. Looking at benchmarks for the i7-6700K, it's best improvement is around 8% over the 3770K and sometimes loses. And games run better on Haswell, the last generation. Skylake's TDP is 91 W vs 3770 Ivy Bridge's 77 W. Color me unimpressed. What does this mean? Moore's Law slowing down? Yes.
Intel had a bear of a time wrestling with the 14 nm node according to reports. With 10 nm two years out and 7nm maybe four years out, miniaturization is all about power conservation than more super power. Sure if you want to go Xeon and pay thousands, there is raw crunching potential to be had. But sadly, last years (state of the art 2013) computers are "fast enough" and even our mobile devices feel "fast enough". My iPhone 6 feels blazingly fast and that's fine. So how do you get consumers to upgrade?
More flash and mirrors.
So what's in it for consumers with Haswell for 2015? For starters there's the enthusiast crowd where entering is only just under $400 with the i7-5820K. Then the middle, but not that middling, processor is the i7-5930K is nearly double at $600 but the bump is not that much in speed but in using multiple graphics cards win tandem (your pick of Nvidias SLI or AMD's Crossfire implementations). This is for the workhorses of driving Virtual Reality at 4KUHD. Last up is the ultimate extreme 5960X (X is bigger and badder than K! It's exXxtra better!) at the cornerstone $1000 which is for the people with too much money to spend and don't care saying they are future proofing or the small home server cruncher. This Haswell platform brings a new socket type and so this means a new motherboard. Adding insult to injury is that your RAM sticks for DDR3 are not usable, thus consumers must purchase new DDR4 memory sticks. Also, to get the biggest bang for your buck for memory bandwidth, it's four channel so get those four RAM sticks. What's even cooler is you can say you have a hexacore, and evoke your inner Wicca. The top end can say octocore (can you say Octocore? I thought you could!) and bring your inner Chuck Norris kung fu grip (sorry Bruce Lee fans). Trade blows with your friends who have the Xeon processors (the point of the Xeon is to have multiple processors on your motherboard and wan too own a rack server in your computer room at home!).
The next phase of computing is wearables. Oculus Rift 3D vision, Microsoft's HoloLens, Google's pounced on googly-eyed Glass (and the horde of glassholes) are coming in 2016. Will it be like the Wii storm? Everyone laughing at the name and then it takes off like a rocket ship or a repeat of the Glass? I think the majority does not want to be the Borg or Cyberdyne or implanted like Cyberpunk or ShadowRun. Mr. Data is cool and all that, but is the world ready for a computerized companion / assistant (Her), a super Roomba (the Maid from the Jetsons), or Augmented (enhanced) Reality (HoloLens / Glass / Terminator HUD)? Well, the military does I'm sure - look at the Air Force training for pilots with the assisted reality and nomenclature symbology they use. It's going to be special cases for wearables. Possibly for consumers it will be medical advances for the Fit Bots. Then as it becomes more germaine, the masses will want their turn for implants or their "Predator" holographic bracer with a built-in touch screen as the next iWatch 2025. Wearables right now bave terrible battery life, so how are they going to power implants? Can't use solar power where the sum don't shine. Have nanobots metatasize sugar and fate in your blood stream? Body thermal heat like in the Matrix? Thermal transfer and conversion is abysmal. Just look at efficiencies of internal combustion engines. How many geothermal energy plant do you know of? Less than .3% of total power production is generated by thermals in the USA. How about a tiny nuclear battery inside you like the Six Million Dollar Man? What, no takers?
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