What comes after Haswell? Are we ever going to get more powerful cpu's?

[lilhasselhoffer]

We are the minority. Power gamers, power programmers, and renderers are (when combined) a barely noticeable minority.


To cater to the biggest market, Intel is pushing x86 into power efficiency. If they can get close to ARM's efficiency, and incorporate their own graphics processor, they will have that market by the short hairs.

To whit, Intel is giving up on the power processors, at least in the desktop arena. Servers are still a focus, but the "enthusiast" level hardware is being slowly choked. Broadwell will bring better power efficiency, a better IGP, and that'll be it. It isn't a pleasant thought, but it's likely the only viable option for Intel.

 

[a_ump]

Good luck with that. If we were following your "requirements", Crysis 3 would still be a 2D side scrolling shooter...

Ppl who usually make media centers or HTPC's usually don't stick the highest end 350 EUR worth CPU into the box so having an integrated crap GPU makes no sense at all. Low end CPU's, maybe, but not highest end ones.

meh i think you're under estimating what IGP can become. My laptop just has Intel HD graphics, not 2k,3k, or 4k, all of which are substantially better; but i can play sc2 on low-med graphics, tf2 on low, l4d low, medieval 2 on medium, League of legends on med-high, Torchlight 2 on high at 1080P.

Now i understand those settings(judging by your specs) are dispicable, but they do allow moderate gaming and HTPC convenience. IGP's used to be good for just getting a display output, nothing more. In the last 3-5 years they have skyrocketed in performance. You may be too busy at the High end to appreciate that progress, but to 80% of the market's avg joe's that go to wal-mart and get desktops and laptops its a godsend to be able to play. IGP in 5 years in relation to today's cards will be good enough that AMD+Nvidia will only be making $200+ graphics chips; intel/amd have already made any dedicated card under $75 bucks a moot point, whereas before $75 dedicated could make a world of difference.

 

[Deleted member 67555]

Good luck with that. If we were following your "requirements", Crysis 3 would still be a 2D side scrolling shooter...

Ppl who usually make media centers or HTPC's usually don't stick the highest end 350 EUR worth CPU into the box so having an integrated crap GPU makes no sense at all. Low end CPU's, maybe, but not highest end ones.

Go back a few years ago and an AMD Phenom II x4 955 with a ATI HD4830 was a decent gaming PC....

You can now get that same performance with a AMD 5800k apu....@ half the price.

Five years from now and at that level of progress and I don't see a discrete graphics card market being sustainable...

 

[Phusius]

Go back a few years ago and an AMD Phenom II x4 955 with a ATI HD4830 was a decent gaming PC....

You can now get that same performance with a AMD 5800k apu....@ half the price.

Five years from now and at that level of progress and I don't see a discrete graphics card market being sustainable...

That is the problem though isn't it? Silicon is meeting it's limits. It really can only get marginally better from here on out, at least until carbon nanotube CPU chips take over, etc. Carbon Nanotube is the future of CPU chips, IBM is investing heavily in them to be ready in a decade.

 

[TRWOV]

Even a 6450 sits slightly above HD4000 graphics but then you remember that a 6450 has about the same performance as an X1950GT. Surely IGPs have come a long way.

 

[Deleted member 67555]

That is the problem though isn't it? Silicon is meeting it's limits. It really can only get marginally better from here on out, at least until carbon nanotube CPU chips take over, etc. Carbon Nanotube is the future of CPU chips, IBM is investing heavily in them to be ready in a decade.

I agree but I also realize Trinity is 32nm and 22nm has way more real estate for graphics cores and there is still a lot of room for improvement for architecture.

 

[Divide Overflow]

Go back a few years ago and an AMD Phenom II x4 955 with a ATI HD4830 was a decent gaming PC....

You can now get that same performance with a AMD 5800k apu....@ half the price.

Five years from now and at that level of progress and I don't see a discrete graphics card market being sustainable...

Certainly the market will shrink considerably but we don't see anything close to higher performance graphics being offered integrated yet. Higher performance demands will continue to sustain the discrete graphics market, although at an increasingly niche status.