and I think there is a difference between 12600k vs 13600k vs 14600k upgrade year over year vs what is coming, what is coming has been in the works for a very very long time. going to be some nice gains I think for AMD and Intel both.
It's safe to disregard 14th Gen entirely if you're looking for a generational leap. The 14th Gen chips are
not a new generation or kind of processor. They're completely unworthy of that title, the whole thing is set up like a scam. It's just Raptor Lake and have absolutely no physical changes despite their Refresh designation. Their internal model, processor revision and stepping are completely identical, they simply ship them with more aggressive clocks on certain SKUs, and introduced the black sheep configuration in the i7-14700K - a 3-cluster (12 E-core) configuration has always been possible but hadn't been released in 13th Gen to make sure that there was a large gap between the Core i7 and Core i9 lineups in MT.
This happens every single year. "The next thing is the best thing just you wait and see!"
Then it isn't. Then, instead of taking the reality check at face value, the chorus begins anew, "No but NEXT thing will be he best thing!"
We are running into the limits of physics. Intel is obfuscating the truth with their new process naming scheme by pretending that sweeping improvements are happening, but the truth is that we've been essentially stuck at a fixed scale for a few years now. A few tweaks to how things are printed at the lowest end of the scale to achieve higher precision across all layers have happened, and each of those tweaks is being treated as a new node. This is not like 20 years ago when the physical size of features was changing dramatically.
Sane evaluation, I agree. I think processors will begin to advance at a much slower pace, and while I feel GPUs haven't quite hit that limitation yet (largely thanks to Nvidia's brilliant engineering), I think that post-Blackwell, they just might. RDNA 3 has utterly failed to pull its weight relative to RDNA 2 across all segments and it shows on a card like the 7900 XTX.
We'll see. Ada did bring some amazing improvements over Ampere if you're strictly talking an ASIC by ASIC basis (eg. full GA102 as seen in 3090 Ti to a hypothetical full AD102 that NVIDIA still hasn't shipped in any segment to date), but the yields have clearly been a challenge and the cost has gotten so high that all gaming-grade SKUs have been upmarked with way lower class silicon (like 4060 using the very smallest AD107 chip) or using heavily cut-down silicon like the RTX 4090 and its lowest-end AD102 configuration, and even in the professional and high-margin AI segments, we haven't received fully enabled chips in most of the stack, with them being completely absent at the high end.
The quote below prodded me back into considering the always uncertain decision to await the next great thing.
Betting he can pass his massive bonus and still inflating domestic foundry costs onto th.... World isn't getting any cooler and I doubt Intel processors and mobo's with their chipset are going to be anything short of stratospherically priced. Not much worth discussing to that end.
The question once again is will Intel deliver a processor and chipset worth waiting for?
That boils down to FOMO. I think at this late stage, spending big bucks on a tricked out enthusiast grade LGA 1700 system is probably not a good idea. Arrow and the LGA 1851 platform will come within a year, this is no secret. However, if you get a decent deal and is building at any level other than flagship, I don't see why wait. Just buy your hardware and be happy.
Same goes for GPUs. If you are buying at the upper-midrange, like RTX 4070 Ti SUPER at most, go ahead and be happy. But I consider it not worth dropping 2k on a 4090 since the 5090 will come before the year's out. New and improved product lines are coming, and it's rare for Intel to release a fluke like the 14th Gen. These exist only to appease shareholders, they aren't new products and minimal effort has been made to conceal that fact: it's just marketed as new so investors don't pull out for failure to achieve.
