what's the next big thing in CPUs after the i7?

[FrankB]

Hi guys,

I havent followed the press for while on what's hot in hardware. For example Cpus. I have the first I7. Now there is Sandybridge or whatever but it's still an I7 if I understand correctly. What is the next cpu on the horizon that will at least double my renderspeed? Is this even known yet?

regards,
Frank

[cyphyr]

I don't know one way or the other but I've also always gone with the theory that an upgrade should double my render output. I think the Hex cores will go more mainstream and there has (for quite some time now) been talk of dumping the virtual cores (hyper-threading) for real cores.
Richard

[Henry Blewer]

I think the next step will be 8 core for mainstream computing. There is a problem. There is a trend to dumb down the PC. All applications will be in 'the cloud'. This is so mobile devices can become more powerful.

If this becomes the direction things go, buying a real PC could become much more expensive. There will be a smaller user base to support PC development.

[Oshyan]

There's no concrete info on what's next, but if Intel sticks to its Tick-Tock cycle, the next "Tick" should have a similar performance impact as the 1st gen i7 as compared to the previous Core Duo/Quad CPUs. The "next big thing" from Intel will be Haswell and it's scheduled for 2013. Before that we'll get more affordable (but still expensive) 8 core, 16 thread CPUs based on Sandy/Ivy Bridge.

Of course AMD is also working on some interesting things but I'm honestly less up-to-date on them as they haven't been up to performance par (per core/clock) lately. Still they may yet come out swinging on a future architecture and tip the scales again as they did years ago with the Athlon architecture (admittedly partly a success as a result of Intel's missteps with the Netburst P4 architecture).

In any case I think it'll be a couple of years yet before there is something beating the pants off i7/Sandy Bridge. Which is a good thing, generally speaking, at least if you don't like spending lots of money all the time on CPUs. A bad thing if you want computers to keep getting faster sooner.

P.S. I don't think we'll see mainstream desktop CPUs going away any time soon. There are plenty of content creation apps like TG2 still driving that market, not to mention many other things like games. We'll see if OnLive and similar systems are long-term successes...

- Oshyan

[FrankB]

Thank you Oshyan, that was very interesting to read!

regards,
Frank

[rcallicotte]

Thanks Oshyan.  Always good to hear your point of view.

[TheBadger]

2013? Hmmmm, buy now or wait? I hate this game. Maybe one of the hardware makers will start doing sales like the software makers do it... Buy now and pay some fee, and then upgrade for free when the new stuff comes out. could be worth it.

[Oshyan]

Some new info came out recently that's highly relevant to new system buyer considerations.

First, from Anandtech, an article on Intel's next big architecture "Ivy Bridge":
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4830/intels-ivy-bridge-architecture-exposed/6
That's a link to the conclusions/summary page. The summary of the summary is that Ivy Bridge does not appear to promise a significant increase either in clock speed or in performance-per-clock. We're looking at maybe a 10% increase in both, at most. Instead Intel seems to be focusing on lowering energy use (primarily with the mobile market in mind, of course) and increasing integrated GPU performance. Unfortunately for Terrageners neither of those things are going to help much with hardcore rendering. On the bright side it means you can happily buy a nice Sandy Bridge (e.g. i7 2600) now and be confident it will be competitive in terms of performance for a fair amount of time.

Second, some might be asking if anything is coming along to best the 2600k for the sweet spot in price/performance, and the answer is "sort of", but not by much:
http://www.techspot.com/news/45527-intel-readies-core-i7-2700k-to-spoil-amds-fx-launch-party.html
The short version is that the 2700k appears to be coming soon but will only be a modest 100Mhz or so per core faster than the 2600k, which will not give you that much additional performance for TG. It will be similarly inexpensive as the 2600k and will also drive down price of the 2600, so I think the older model may still be the sweet spot. The up shot is that the "sweet spot" is in fact lowering in price slightly, overall.

Finally, if you really want max performance and price isn't a concern, you don't have to wait for Haswell. The Xeon E5 and E7 series' are coming soon and they'll be a potent mix of tons of cores and high prices. More info here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Xeon_microprocessors#.22Westmere-EX.22_.2832_nm.29
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/sandy-bridge-e-xeon-cpu-servers,13308.html

Don't let the lower clock rates (e.g. 2.4Ghz) fool you, a 10 core 2.4Ghz CPU would eat TG2 scenes for breakfast. The Xeon E5-2687W is probably going to be the absolute tops for single CPU performance with 8 cores/16 threads at 3.1Ghz, but it won't come cheap.

- Oshyan

[Seth]

2600K is gooood for TG2

[Luc]

Hi

just posted a review of latest flagship AMD FX processor (Bulldozer architecture with 8 cores)

http://www.guru3d.com/article/amd-fx-8150-processor-review/

luc

[Tangled-Universe]

Read the review as well as on 2 renowned Dutch tech-sites: all 3 conclusions were the same. Bulldozer performs pretty nice in multi-threaded applications, but per core performance is quite inferior to the 2600k. So a nice processor for rendering, but still not faster or as fast as an i7-2600K.
The 2600k is better at the vast majority of multi-threaded applications.
The per core performance is important for daily tasks which are often very poorly multi-threaded. 2600K shines even brighter there.

I'm not sure, but I don't think this release really delivers.
Next year the next gen of these AMD processors will be released and since they're told to scale extremely well I'm curious about those.

CPU prices are pretty comparable, though the other hardware for Intel CPU's is a bit more expensive.
For now, the biggest bang for buck is still an i7-2600k IMHO.

Cheers,
Martin

[Luc]

IMHO too 

[Oshyan]

For now, the biggest bang for buck is still an i7-2600k IMHO.

Agreed. That's why I just bought one. We'll see how high they can overclock it for me.

- Oshyan