Last year I went looking through consumer-class CPUs looking to upgrade. They are more or less all a very unimpressive 4 core, 8 thread, 3.0 ghz. Maybe they have a tiny bit more cache. There is absolutely no reason to upgrade.
Progress on consumer-class CPUs this decade has been utterly anemic. The only one I've seriously been wowed by is the Ryzen Threadripper. Now all of a sudden, Intel is readying better CPUs. Entirely coincidental, I'm sure.
No, it's not the mid 90's anymore where we were tripling performance every time we upgraded. There's still progress.
In a way, that was good thing, though. For the first time in my memory, a five-year-old PC is not a piece of junk I am just too lazy to get rid off, but a machine fully capable running current software (at least after install more RAM and an SSD). (Within reasonable limits, of course, I am not talking about high end games or such.)
The fact that CPUs did not get faster (not much, at least) also meant that software could not afford to get slower, which greatly extended the useful lifespans of older machines.
A Sandy Bridge 4-core, 8-thread, 3.0 ghz CPU from 2011 would be something like a i7-2960XM. It's actually 2.70 ghz base frequency, but 8MB cache and 55W.
A comparable modern CPU (same cores, threads, base frequency, cache) is a i7-8559U. This has a TDP of 28W.
The old processor would scale up to 3.7 ghz while the new one scales up to 4.5. And the new processor has 1.5 times the memory bandwidth. And I expect the GPU is a lot better.
The new processor probably has somewhat better instruction throughput at the same clock rate. All that said, I agree this is not the 90s and we're not getting 10x or more improvements in speed over the course of 7 years here... The new processor _is_ better; just not enough better to be worth paying $400 for unless you're getting a new computer anyway for other reasons.
(Note that these are both "mobile" processors, fwiw; I assume that's the comparison point if we're talking consumer-class, because consumers don't really buy desktops.)
In order to maximize their yield and make consumer processors an economic reality, Intel tests every single chip that goes off the assembly line and cut the "fuses" of the regions that don't pass quality control. A perfect chip becomes an i7 (or an i9 or even sometimes a Xeon) while the less perfect chips become i5s and the ones with the most errors become i3s with most of their cores disabled.
As other posters have noted: that 2600K CPU part you bought in 2011 is the Intel Extreme line, which are the top of the line i7s that have not only passed QC on their cores but have also been "burned in" or tested for stability at the higher end of possible operating frequencies for that generation. You're literally comparing the best of the best from 7 years ago to stuff that just barely missed the dumpster.
For example, out of the dozens of desktops I've built for my friends, family, and me, all of the -K processors that I've used are still alive today - including an i7-965 Extreme that's almost ten years old now. My experience with i3/i5 is much worse.
AMD's Zen arch is an 8 core die, and they get very high yields out of it. Even the downmarket parts mostly or entirely had 8 working cores before fusing off.
Intel's big 28 core parts are (at least historically) a huge single die, with very very low yields. They charge a huge dollar amount for the parts because they cannot afford not to — the manufacturing costs are very high. There is some speculation that this 5GHz part is actually a bridged smaller die design, like AMD's Zen platform. Intel's bridge design is called "EMIB," if you want to google that speculation further.
No. The 2700K was a high end consumer CPU that could be bought for about $300, and didn't need a crazy expensive motherboard or socket. It wasn't extreme (also note the lack of an "X" in the model name).
(FWIW, TR is a very upmarket part compared to a 4-core SB and you will pay a large premium for that, especially for the motherboard. However, even an 8-core Ryzen 1700X would be a huge upgrade over a 4-core SB and the 4- and 6-core Ryzens look very affordable.)
I went from a Nehalem i7 3.20GHz extreme hex core, to a kabylake i7 7700k 4-core, and it's a night and day difference.
In every one of my use cases my 7700k outperforms the older CPU.
Now I am not completely sure they are just sitting in a warehouse though. I understand Volta is currently in mass production and will launch around July/August.
They don't go up to that insane frequency, but still. There's plenty of opportunity to shop around if you want really beefy systems, which is a very refreshing state of affairs compared to just two years ago.
The Epyc 7501, 7601, etc, are all 32 cores and 64 threads.
This sounds extraordinarily doable to me. I'd be very shocked if this was anything but an off-the-shelf SKL-SP die with consumer fusing.
[1] And given that it's a server part, this calibration is inherently more conservative than you see in desktop stuff.
Also, while not AVX-intensive, CB does use some AVX, which usually draws more power (and thus limits clock more) than pure integer or even ordinary FPU computation.
Jumping from 3.8 GHz single core turbo to 5 GHz 28-core turbo is a big jump in power.
I am just afraid Intel will once more use its deep pockets and questionable business practices to crush AMD just when things were starting to get interesting again.
EDIT: Typo
"Intel stated in 2015 that the pace of advancement has slowed, starting at the 22 nm feature width around 2012, and continuing at 14 nm.[20] Brian Krzanich, CEO of Intel, announced, 'Our cadence today is closer to two and a half years than two.'"
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Moore%27s_law
"Intel disclosed in a regulatory filing that it is slowing the pace with which it launches new chip-making technology."
https://www.technologyreview.com/s/601102/intel-puts-the-bra...
Moore's law for GPUs, on the other hand, hasn't slowed down yet because it's not as close to the wall.
https://blog.openai.com/ai-and-compute/
https://www.pcgamer.com/nvidia-ceo-says-moores-law-is-dead-a...
Moore's law doesn't include capital investment as a factor.
Initially, it could be mostly ignored as it was swamped by available profits (at least for microprocessors, less so for memory). More recently, I believe it's been matched by increased volume of semiconductors used throughout the global economy.
But at some point we'll reach saturation. And costs to shrink feature size will continue to increase exponentially. So it simply won't make financial sense to continue.
(Unless non-silicon, non-electrical, or radical patterning technology hits a breakthrough)
Presumably they were too expensive (manufacturing, power, cooling, etc.) since they're not ubiquitous. IIRC the "barrier" to going any higher was the speed of light across the chip: running faster than 5GHz would require the output to be causally independent from the input!
Interesting how only when AMD starts shipping something competitive with their chips, does Intel roll up its sleeves and get busy on breaking new ground. There almost seems to be a correlation ...!