New
#140
Mike, I guess you missed this. Intel will release 8th-gen Coffee Lake chips this year - still 14nm
To be released in the 2nd half of this year
at least 1 6 Core chip for mainstream platform
a 15% increase over Kaby Lake.
Intel seems very anti-progression when it comes to the consumer market and very quick to decide what they think people should have.
Before AMD launched the athlon64 lineup, Intel claimed that there was no benefit to adding 64-bit capability. Now they've been reluctant to launch anything affordable with more than 4 cores. AMD will once again show them the way, even if they're not going to be the best as they were in the Athlon64 era.
I can't help but wonder what the CPU market would be like if Nvidia or some other company could produce x86 CPUs.
To be fair, there really was no benefit to 64-bit at the time. There were no OS's that could take advantage of it, and memory was significantly more expensive. Getting more than 4GB was out of reach of most people. Intel had the Itanium which was 64-bit, and it wasn't particularly popular even in its niche market.
The real benefits of 64-bit (when it finally came with the athlon64 was with the added registers and instructions that improved performance, not so much the "64-bitness" of it. It wasn't until much later that > 4GB memory became reasonable.
The 6800k while only $400, runs on the enthusiast 2011-3 socket and those motherboards aren't the cheapest. Its not just the CPU that must be factored in, its the entire platform.
LGA 2011-v3, Intel Motherboards, Motherboards, Components - Newegg.com
AMD's 6-8 core CPUs will run on an average joe platform.
There were performance benefits in AMD's Athlon64 CPU at the time even without running more than 4GB of RAM or a 64-bit capable OS. I moved from and Northwood core P4 to and A64 and there was a noticeable difference in everyday tasks. The added registers were the direct result of having a full 64-bit architecture.
Windows XP had a 64-bit variant at the time but it was actually Server 2003 at the core. I ran 32-bit XP on up to 7 at which time I moved to 64-bit.
Even though it would take a few more years for users to see most of the benefits of 64-bit computing, I'd argue that if AMD had not gone 64-bit when it did, Intel would've stuck with 32-bit far longer and we wouldn't be as far along as a result.
Just to clarify, I'm not an AMD fanboy. I'll go where the performance is. My main rig is an i5 6500 along with an RX480. My HTPC is an Phenom II x4 paired with a 1050Ti.
I could pay just as much if not more for a Skylake board as I could for a Broadwell-E board. So that's not saying anything. That's not a valid argument. Sorry.
You don't need all the added bells & whistles (which drives up the cost of MB's) to get the a CPU to run on it. You could just get a bare essentials board for say a hundred bucks and run any chip on it - whether it be a $1000 dollar chip or a $300 dollar chip.
MB costs rise as features rise. The chip is prices are fixed at a given performance rating.