How many businesses and servers are going to be buying/upgrading to these Haswell refreshes from the previous series? For all of maybe 1-5%?
My complaints are valid just as are your complaints. Your reasoning that most enthusiasts wanting power efficiency is flawless.
My comments are referencing the enthusiast and overclocking user communities and their wants from Intel. Many feel this way and are the minority to the vast mainstream majority.
You may be happy with Intel's progress, I'm not. Like it or not we're all stuck with Intel. I will be glad for the day they get real competition to put them on their ass.
You seem to not understand. The physics here is simple. Semi-conductors break down when you bake them, and they can't switch properly as more heat is built up. This is why Intel focuses on heat.
Let's, for just a moment, think about a car instead of a chip. In the 60's and 70's the big push was to increase the cubic volume of the combustion chamber. More volume meant more boom, and more boom drove the cars faster. Your enthusiast car was fast, with a large volume engine.
Now, assuming this trend continued our engines on super cars would have cylinders as big as the old cars. Suck in a gallon of atomized fuel, combust, and you'll get to go 200 miles per hour, for the 2 minutes your fuel tank could provide the gasoline.
Do you see super cars with 1000 CC capacities today? No. You see cars that developed new technologies. A turbo or super charger increase the air quantity in a cylinder, creating a more efficient combustion. Fuel ratios are managed dynamically for the most efficient combustion at a given temperature. Engines are designed with better cooling systems to increase the change in combustion temperature and ambient temperature, to increase expansion volume of the combustion. All of these things don't do a lot to speed up a car, but their combined effect is to have a vehicle that actually uses less fuel and goes faster than old cars.
Intel did the same thing. They gave up on increasing frequency, and focused on thermal performance. A decrease in temperature output of a few degrees per transistor means more can be packed together. Increasing core count allows threaded loads to run faster. Integration of a GPU allows certain encoding to run faster. Honestly, I'd take a 3770 above almost any Core2Quad. The core2 might overclock, but that 3770 (yes, not a k) will spank it every which way. Assuming you go for the 3770k, you get to overclock. Not everyone's bag, but it allows enthusiasts to say that they managed to push their processor faster than those plebs running at stock clocks.
You might lament the fact that Intel is pushing for power efficiency, but make sure you aren't shooting yourself in the foot. Those enthusiast 6 core processors only exist because someone at Intel decreased thermal outputs. They could make a chip 4x the size of current ones, but I'm sure that nobody would pay the $4000+ for a single Enthusiast processor. If you think I'm wrong, then go out and buy for 4960x systems. I'll gladly take one off your hands for free, because two of them have enough raw processing power to stomp anything out there. Donate the third to charity, and consider yourself satisfied with being able to afford more computing power than 99.99% of the population will need in the next decade.
There are very real contentions to be made with Intel's output. The inclusion of a lackluster graphics core in their high end mainstream CPU is only viable if you're an encoder. The movement of VRM onto the CPU means that much more heat is near your system's most heat sensitive component. Thermal paste between the processor and chip lid meant poor performance, even when not overclocking. All of this is a viable argument, but Intel working to reduce thermal output is not. You'll never see a 10+ core consumer CPU if they don't make sure that the processor won't incinerate itself during operation. Your enthusiast chips need that thermal envelope to allow overclocking.
