WTF, hardware guys?

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George
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WTF, hardware guys?

Post by George »

My desktop is three years old, so I started reading reviews to figure out what to replace it with. Looking at the comparisons between contemporary CPUs, I'd homed in on an i5 or i7 haswell. As I was trying to decide whether I'd need HyperThreading for anything, I stumbled across an article that put my old Core i7 2600 in the same tier as the new CPUs I was looking at. :shock: More research seems to confirm that my non-flagship, three-year-old CPU is still competitive with the bleeding edge.

So, um, what the fuck? Did Intel's and AMD's ECEs just phone it in for three years straight? Moore's Law promised me a 4x speedup, and the best they can do is 10%?

Anyway, if I'm not misinterpreting the comparison, should I just replace the video card and skip the CPU, MB, and memory upgrades? If it's relevant, the motherboard is P67-based, and the memory is probably whatever the middle-of-the-road speed was back then.
Jonathan wrote:
George wrote:I can say that [the Core i7] seems qualitatively faster than my old 2.2 GHz Athlon X2.
Confirming this: SNB is faster than an Athlon X2.
I thought this was hilarious when it was posted. Not so funny anymore.
I feel like I just beat a kitten to death... with a bag of puppies.

quantus
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by quantus »

Ummm, duh? Really, what did you expect? Most of the architectural tricks have been played out for single threaded perf. Clock speeds aren't scaling higher anymore. ILP (instruction level parallelism) has pretty much been completely extracted at this point. It's up to you CS guys to get off your asses and design your algorithms to the new highly parallel (GPGPU) paradigm. This has been the message for the last decade, not just the last 3 years.

Interesting, according to this chart, my 2700K is worth more than a 4770K:
http://www.cpubenchmark.net/high_end_cpus.html
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quantus
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by quantus »

I'm going to repeat advice I've been giving for a few years now, "Buy an SSD if you don't already have one". As long as you have SATA-II support and are running Win7 or later, it'll be a huge upgrade and the best !/$. Latency to the data is by far the biggest limiter of performance when using a HDD.

What video card do you have? If it's more than 2 generations old, then probably worth upgrading it. A gtx560 or higher and I think a radeon 66xx or higher will likely be fine for all but the newest games.
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Jonathan
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by Jonathan »

Sorry. I... I thought you knew?

http://jonathan.pearce.name/mohtalim/vi ... f=3&t=3948
It's a decent part. It's obviously way more interesting for scientific computing and laptops than for desktops. If you're into desktops, I don't know what to tell you. Get a hundred million of your friends together and start demanding better products?
Can't say I didn't warn you.

There's two fundamental issues.
The first is that voltage scaling has been relatively flat even as transistor density increases. This creates power density issues which retard the turning of the frequency crank even if people were willing to pay for ever-increasing power delivery & cooling solutions, which they are not.
http://jonathan.pearce.name/mohtalim/vi ... ell#p28105 (follow the link in the text)

The second is smaller devices won't be any cheaper (on TSMC's process).
http://jonathan.pearce.name/mohtalim/vi ... 052#p28499 (follow the link in the text)

The only consolation I have for you is a 128MB on-package cache coming Soon(TM):
http://www.pcper.com/news/Processors/In ... GA-Sockets
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6993/inte ... -tested/18

But, yeah. I dunno, man. Where you been?

Jonathan
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by Jonathan »

When you are in grown-ass man territory, I would want my GPU to be at least 2x faster than the latest console. More than 8x is overkill, though, and really 4x is pushing it. Even with more pixels to eat up all that perf at a level 60fps, the art assets won't have the fidelity to give you substantially better visuals until another rev of the console hardware.

George
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by George »

I completely ignore all hardware developments except for a month or two prior to upgrading. It's worked fine for the last few upgrade cycles. Give the hardware engineers a few years to do their thing, and when I start paying attention again, the current tech is magically significantly faster than before. So, for the last three years, my head has been willfully buried in the sand.

I didn't make the connection to any of the previous posts, because I they occurred in that three year window, so I forgot them immediately after reading them.

I've got an SSD, though I was late to the party there. Video card is a Radeon 6950.

Hopefully you guys will get back on track, so that when I go to buy a new computer in 2017, it will be 16x faster. Because, by God, my software will be 16x slower.
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Jonathan
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by Jonathan »

George wrote:Video card is a Radeon 6950.
http://www.anandtech.com/bench/product/510?vs=508
http://www.anandtech.com/show/5476/amd- ... 950-review

A 6950 is roughly in-line with PS4 performance, so it should be able to handle all the latest multi-platform launches. If you wanted to drop $500 on video upgrades, you could double that perf right now, assuming you have the power supply to drive a 250W card. The 7950 is not 2x but it'd be a noticeable upgrade. Don't expect much after that without going to dual-GPU because of the process issues at 20nm/16nm, as I noted previously. The 7xxx cards are 28nm cards, so that's where TSMC sputters out.

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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

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quantus
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by quantus »

Whether we'll make it through 8-10 more years of scaling is still being debated as we've always not really had good visibility 10+ years out. In 2-3 more years, if they're still saying the same thing, then, we'll know for sure. Still, it wouldn't surprise me if transistor scaling were totally broke then. We've already broken a corollary to Moore's law with regards to frequency scaling back in 2004. As Jonathan already linked to, we're about to break Moore's Law for transistors/$ (another link with more people complaining about T/$: http://www.eetimes.com/author.asp?secti ... id=1321536). Once this breaks, there' s little to no economic reason to continue pushing scaling at the same rate, so the technical arguments will become moot. SRAM is at this wall now and we're very reliant on it now, but if we can reduce our need for it, we might have a chance? FD-SOI might help, but designing with it is a bit iffy.
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Peijen
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by Peijen »

Is GTX 750 Ti any good? I am using Intel's integrated chip right now, 4700 or something. Willing to spend up to 250/300 but don't want a power hoag

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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by Jonathan »

The 4600 is going to run at max turbo frequency (1.2 GHz) in your desktop. The mobile HD Graphics, on the other hand, needs to reduce its frequency in most benchmarks/games unless you bought one in like a 47W laptop (unlikely). So comparing the 4600 to laptop reviews isn't terribly useful.

http://www.digitaltrends.com/computing/ ... ed/#!BY6QP - They offlined the discrete card in a Fragbox to get these numbers. Seems legit.
HD 4600 BF3 - 31 fps (1366×768 medium)
750 Ti BF3 - 47 fps (1920×1080 ultra)
Dunno what kind of screen you've got, but me I hate to run at anything but my monitor's native resolution. So getting to playable at 1080p on older titles is a useful upgrade!

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/nv ... ew,14.html
750 Ti BF4 - 37 fps (1920x1080 ultra)
If you are looking to dip your toe into recent games, though, I'd probably cough up more money. There's a lot of things faster than a 750 Ti.

Regarding hogs:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/pow ... 61-12.html

75W is bullshit "look I have a branded card so I am a 133t".
150W is the mainstream. You can get these with silent cooling solutions.
225W is the performance.
Above that is more bullshit "look I have a kilowatt of power supply".

quantus
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by quantus »

I'm pretty sure we target 250-300W as the max for our high end single chip (non-sli) cards, so a 225W target seems a little arbitrary... For the price range he's looking for though, it seems likely it'll be closer to a 150W part like a GTX 760 (Kepler). If you wait a bit, you can probably pick up a Maxwell part for desktop in a couple months when those products finally get released. Maxwell is a nice step up in perf/W as reviewers have seen for the 750. The slow roll out is probably due to lack of a competitor refresh to finalize the perf/W trade off against.
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Peijen
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by Peijen »

quantus wrote:If you wait a bit, you can probably pick up a Maxwell part for desktop in a couple months when those products finally get released. Maxwell is a nice step up in perf/W as reviewers have seen for the 750. The slow roll out is probably due to lack of a competitor refresh to finalize the perf/W trade off against.
Well, hurry up.

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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by Jonathan »

quantus wrote:I'm pretty sure we target 250-300W as the max for our high end single chip (non-sli) cards, so a 225W target seems a little arbitrary...
Ain't arbitrary. I described the breakpoints in number of plugs you need from your power supply going into the card. I stand by my >225W = bullshit.

DX12 is FUD. Don't worry about that.

If you think you are going to do this once for the lifetime of your machine, wait for Maxwell. Otherwise, just get the 760. Kepler is a good gfx part, and hopefully you can still find quiet/silent cooling SKUs. I have not actually checked; 170W sounds a bit steep for that.

Peijen
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by Peijen »

does Maxwell cards handles 3 monitor without splitters and what not? Assume I get the more powerful card to come out later.

quantus
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by quantus »

Peijen wrote:does Maxwell cards handles 3 monitor without splitters and what not? Assume I get the more powerful card to come out later.
I have no clue how many heads are being enabled and on which cards. I'm pretty certain that 3 heads will be fairly standard. Using splitters is pretty likely though I'd think to avoid adding more plugs.
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Jonathan
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by Jonathan »

Good news! The $1499, 500W Hawaii-based ATI card just launched. Your problems are over.

quantus
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by quantus »

Yeah, that card's pretty funny. It's a bit late for April Fool's...
http://community.amd.com/community/amd-blogs/amd-gaming/blog/2014/04/08/hail-to-the-king-introducing-the-amd-radeon-r9-295x2 wrote:Finally, this wholly uncompromising king of the mountain will demand an unapologetic 500W from a power supply. Users should be ready with a PSU that provides at least 28 amps on two separate 12 volt rails.
Anyways, this release seems like it's just to get something out there before the Titan Z starts shipping and is ready to be reviewed and AMD/ATI has no way of catching it short of a cryo unit and a mini nuclear reactor.
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George
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by George »

quantus wrote:a cryo unit and a mini nuclear reactor.
I would buy a card equipped with those.
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Jonathan
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Re: WTF, hardware guys?

Post by Jonathan »

The gauntlet is thrown!

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