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| Protendo said: I think a big part of the problem is that Intel is complacent. An I2600K OC is still viable for everything 4+ years later. What is the reason to upgrade? The performance increase is just not worth the extremely minor upgrade. If computers bought 2 years ago, aren't much faster than a new computer than what incentive do customers have to upgrade? |
I doubt it is about Intel being complacent. I don't buy either into the "AMD is weak, so we don't try" conspiracy. The instruction set architecture of x86 is very complex, and bloated from over 35 years of expansions. Intel tried to move away from it once with Itanium, but failed, not specifically because of the merits of x86 but the fact the whole thing was a miss on Pentium 4 levels.
That is not to say x86 is bad. Any architecture coming close to it on single-thread performance would suffer from the same downsides. It's feasible Intel could squeeze, say, an extra 10% IPC improvement by doubling transistor count every die shrink, but then power consumption targets would shoot through the roof, and they wouldn't have space for iGPUs unless they made the chips bigger (and thus start to reduce their profit margins significantly - though maybe prompting theirs, and other foundries, to switch to larger silicon wafers sooner).
