I'll be surprised if there's even a 20% CPU perf increase with Skylake. We should all know by now that Intel are going for efficiency over pure power gains and they have been doing so for a goid number of years.
The two are not mutually exclusive (never have been)
efficiency has always gone up...
It was always going to be more power efficient , they are just choosing to sell you smaller dies (or more die space to an iGPU) for the same amount of money. Nothing more, nothing less.
If you asked anyone in 2011 (after sandy bridge released) what 250$ cpus would be like in 2015 they would have said 6-8 core cpus with much better IPC and would be pretty appaled by the current situation.
(also if you warned me abou this in 2011 I would have sold my phenom II and bought an i5 2600k immediately, knowing it's the best I was going to get for at least 5-6 years at that price)
I think "20% improvements" is going to be the new normal, Stephan. Even if this thread's rumor is correct, the "high end" AMD card taking advantage of the brand new high bandwidth memory technology is a mere 25% improvement over a "mid range" card from 6 months ago. And it's more like 20% from 980 -> Titan X according to those graphs. The 600,700,900 transitions seem roughly in line with this.
CPU stuff has stagnated years ago and GPU tech just isn't improving as fast as it used to be. If you do the math, a 20% Year on Year improvement for each generation yields a 5 year total improvement of 2.5x the original card's power. 3.5x after 7 years. That's pathetic and represents a clear trend of slowing GPU tech.
Except northern islands -> GCN was a far greater jump than 20 percent
The limited jump from the 980 to the 390x is understandable as nvidia seem to have the better architecture here (it's still supposed to be a 40-50 percent jump from the 290x, right, or did that rumor change again) and both maxwell and the new amd gpus are stuck on 28nm.
Despite being stuck at 28 nm, there has been a much bigger jump between early 2011 and early 2015 (3x performance in 4 years, not 3.5 in 7 years) and we would have had our proper full jump if 20nm fabs were ready.
The problem in gpu land is not that high end gpus are no longer being made, they very much are (500-600mm^2 dies with 8 billion transistors, now 1024bit busses and massive bandwidth increases incoming).
The problem in gpu land is that prices have doubled (because fuck consumers we'll still buy it anyhow, right nvidia?)
That situation is still
infinitely preferable to the cpu one where not only do we not get high end cpus, we don't get any gains at all..
Intel is many die shrinks ahead of the fabs amd and nvidia has and they've had many architecture improvements to enable more performance/watt and more performance/die space.
But instead of seeing a transistor budget growth we just keep getting smaller dies and more of that die used on iGPU rather than cpu.
Core i7 (Quad) 731,000,000 2008 Intel 45 nm 263 mm² (i7 920)
Quad-core + GPU Core i7 1,160,000,000 2011 Intel 32 nm 216 mm² (sandy bridge)
Quad-core + GPU Core i7 1,400,000,000 2012 Intel 22 nm 160 mm² (ivy)
Quad-core+GPU Core i7 1,400;000,000 2014 Intel 22nm finfet 177 mm² (haswell)
See the pattern here?
Smaller dies, more of it dedicated to igpu negating any performance benifits from new architectures and die shrinks.
From the rumored 20 percent IPC increase + edram + 14nm intel fabrication process we can probably expect a similar or smaller die size compared to ivy/haswell, and all the extra transistor budget thrown away on the EDRAM for their precious igpu
If there is no edram then expect a smaller(cheaper) die, at the same price of course.
edit: rumor is the base clocks will be higher so there migth not even BE any IPC increase... in which case definitely an even smaller die.
And ofcourse they don't want to give you a full cpu dedicated die as the performance of it would (rightfully) make their apus looks like garbage in comparison...
The cpu situation is very different to the gpu one and it is much much worse.
The problem isn't just that the quad core skylake from the rumors should've been the celeron by now , but that there in fact IS no i5-i7 performance cpu.