I don't think the desktop is shrinking as much as sales suggest. I would happily drop 2k on a new desktop if there where any reason to do so. Intel chose to waste 5 years of performance gain on a low end graphics capability's instead of bumping cheap multi core performance.

That use of "cheap" is doing too much work. Obviously Intel hasn't squandered many-core scalability either, c.f. Broadwell-E which is available with as many as 10 cores and targetted at exactly your market.

It's just not cheap, being a 240mm2 die (almost twice what Kaby Lake is, with attendant yield penalties) targetted at a niche market with low volume.

So your point isn't that Intel isn't innovating, it's that you want them to do it in a way that violates straightforward economics and hand it to you for less than it takes to produce.

Basically: you got spoiled by the early days of the VLSI revolution. Silicon scaling isn't doing what you expect any more.

At Intel's scale having 4 core chips with integrated graphics or 6 core chips without integrated graphics and slightly smaller transistor count is not a significant cost, meaning they could both sell for similar prices.

They don't do this because they have zero real completion and can milk the high end market. Further, by holding back performance gains they can extend the upgrade cycle as long as possible.

PS: Cellphones are approaching Desktop chip performance.

> At Intel's scale having 4 core chips with integrated graphics or 6 core chips without integrated graphics and slightly smaller transistor count is not a significant cost, meaning they could both sell for similar prices.

Yeah, that's not how silicon manufacturing works. Tooling up for a new part of this size and ramping production gets into the tens to hundreds of millions of dollars. No one does niche-market (and yes, gaming desktops are niche) parts at the prices you expect.

Low-volume big parts cost a thousand dollars or more, that's no different at Intel than it is anywhere else.

It's going to be ~1:1 with the number of discrete nvidia + AMD graphics cards sold which is not exactly niche.

Further, Intel already has a range of chips in production making that 100's of millions per chip vastly overblown. You can measure these numbers in several ways, but ramping up 100 million of chip X or 80 million of chip X and 20 million of chip version Y is nowhere near 200+ million.

Ed: For clarity the cost delta is not 200+ million, the price is vastly more than 200+ million to make 100 million of chip X.

While I certainly wouldn't turn away multi-core performance improvements, the onus isn't entirely on Intel. A large portion of the software market still makes no or very poor use of multiple cores. Cranking that performance up for many apps that won't use it really isn't a selling point to the general market. It would be a boon for specialized workflows, certainly not denying that, but it's not nearly as attention grabbing or experience improving as solid integrated graphics are. Just a few years ago integrated graphics were garbage, and now they're reasonably formidable for most tasks, even some light gaming.

Why, about any resource intensive line of application out there does use all of CPU & GPU gains you throw at it. Adobe Premiere does, Autodesk Revit, Inventor etc.

Just finished a CAD workstation build for my wife with state of the art components. The performance gain over a couple years old "pro laptop" she used before is enormous. And not just on raytraced views and renders, the whole UX is much much smoother.

Is desktop a shrinking market or have we reach peak saturation? Desktops are very affordable (relatively speaking). The people who want one will get them. Processors are some of the least upgraded [citation needed] components of a desktop system, because there isn't a large incentive to get one. It's rarely the bottleneck of the system. As someone else has said, it's a mature market.

I recently upgraded from an '09 processor because my motherboard died. Trying to find a new one to fit the old chipset was rough, so I got a processor as well. I didn't need to get a new processor, because it wasn't the bottleneck. There are many instances where the new one will give me better results, but it wasn't so bad that I was hurting. Unless you have a specific need, upgrading for the sake of upgrading is largely wasted money.