Well, for chips that are, say, twice as fast as the best current chips for three times the money, I suspect that the market is in fact shrinking, because for most people, current chips are good enough.

There's still plenty of people who want more speed badly enough to pay for it, but my impression is that there aren't as many as there used to be.

Or in other words, the market for single-chip performance is shrinking.

The hyperscale folks care about how much physical space given performance takes, but that's likely more energy/performance than chipcount/performance constrained.

Agreed, there's still plenty of people hitting pain with Image/Video processing, 3D development (design or programming), 4K video/gaming/modelling are definitely still out there...

Upgraded to an i7-4790K almost 2 years ago, and while not willing to drop another $1500 to upgrade to the latest CPU/MB, I have been keeping an eye open.

That was my thought too... Facebook, Google/GCE, Amazon/AWS, Azure, U.S. and Chinese governments probably account for most CPU purchases from Intel.

The "super 7" as they're called, account for ~60% of Intel's data center revenue, which accounts for ~60% of their profit.

7 companies provide Intel with 36% of its profit...

The "Super 7" are: Facebook, Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Baidu, Alibaba and Tencent.

Source: http://fortune.com/2015/11/15/intel-super-7/

I mean, that's bog-standard 80-20 rule stuff, innit?