- Saturday, 21 November 2009
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Communism doesn't work because people like to own stuff - Frank Zappa
Crisis looms for PC CPU market
TAIWAN'S MANUFACTURERS are bracing themselves. Even big-wigs like Asus are uncertain about this year's numbers - same applies for the relatively successful smaller players like Thermaltake and DFI.
Shopkeepers we've spoken to in those humongous electronics trade malls all over Far East - Taipei's Nova, Shanghai's Xujiahui and Pudong malls and Singapore's old Sim Lim Square all show a similar story.
First, the very high-end CPU sales still exist, but only just. In any of these three cities, it seems that no one save a few still rich 'enthusiasts' wants to spend more than about 300 US bucks per CPU. And no, the expected massive fall of that US buck vs local currencies once Obama's honeymoon passes might not help, as the ripples would be felt here too.Where does that leave us?
Intel Core i7 920 or the new E-stepping Q9550 2.83 GHz / FSB1333, which is in the same price range might be a good buy, as it can easily go to 4GHz / FSB2000 on most P45 or X48 mobos without much tweaking. And it evens out the ground for AMD, as Phenom II does stand a bit more chance in the mainstream CPU segment vs the 'enthusiast' one where Intel's pure performance still rules.
The buyers are, however, willing to splurge a bit more on a good mobo to extract the maximum out of that CPU they get. The price difference there isn't that bad, after all.
Second casualty? All those SLI and Crossfire setups. When money runs short, paying a power bill or food on time - or taking a girlfriend for a proper meal - takes priority vs the second dual-GPU card for bit more frame rate - unless you're an absolute nerd who doesn't mind crap food and no women.
Jokes aside, the shopkeepers complain about a marked dip even in the enquiries for the high end cards alone, not to mention the multi GPU setups - ATI HD4830, 4670 and Geforce 9800 series are favourites. But there is an even more marked increase in the 'integrated graphics' setups: "Son, it's good enuff for your homework - online 3-D games will wait till Dad's got his job back". Which, in the present situation, could be a long way off.
Memories still sell well - the Vista behemoth really loves 4GB or more, and it's cheap enough to still fit in the budget. Interestingly, there are a lot of enquiries in the shops about SSDs, but most buyers still end up with HDDs instead, and seemingly there is return interest in smaller capacities below 300GB - as one vendor said: "Users don't see a reason for superbig drives even if the price premium is small, unless they copy over movies". Uh huh, they better not tell it to RIAA / MPAA, whatever - but then those US entities can't do much in China, hehe...
Talk about movies - Blu-ray drive sales seem to be dismal. As one China seller said, "Just download and play the HD movie off USB stick, haha!" He actually showed it, and it did look like 1080i or HD on a 24-inch Full HD monitor. How it was decoded or cracked, I don't want to guess.
The CPU thing is intriguing. Will Intel and AMD de-emphasise their Extreme CPUs because of this crisis? Probably not. These high-end products, even if no one really buys them, represent the competitive position of each vendor, and very important bragging rights. As in the GPU example, the leadership at the top does trickle to the improved sales of same vendors' midrange wares. And Intel still needs a high-end market tester for the 32nm Westmere launch.
If I was assembling a 3,000 quid box (OK, a quid isn't much these days, guys - feel our pain!), I'd still be willing to spend 20 per cent of that on a darn good top-bin CPU to power it for the next few years. But, maybe, some other users will have different priorities in the belt-tightening Year Of Da Ox. What will be YOUR priorities?
Talking about that, we wish all our Far Eastern readers Gong Xi Fa Cai / Kung He Fatt Choy or, in a bit of English, Happy Lunar New Year! µ
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"I'd still be willing to spend 20 per cent of that on a darn good top-bin CPU to power it for the next few years".
OK, here's my position: instead of blowing all that money upfront and somewhat speculatively (are you *sure* it's more CPU power (GPU, RAM, etc.) you need? What if the software you use makes better use of something else, in 6 months' time?), why not buy a mid-range rig and upgrade as the need arises?
Almost certainly cheaper in the long run, the performance you get is more even over time and better tailored to your specific needs, you don't have to pay that big a lump of cash and your hardware spends more time under warranty, since you replace it just as or soon after the warranty expires.
Not to mention that all the old parts can either be sold (with less of a price drop than the high-end hardware, I might add) or used to build secondary rigs to do boring stuff you don't have to look at all the time.
then I don't really see the point of high end at this time....the way the gaming market has gone most games are now developed with the consoles in mind and consequently will chunter along quite nicely on a mid range PC. Is it really worth the cost of a high end PC just to play the handful of PC exclusives that may tax your system? To my mind the answer is no.
Looking at CPU price progression, it can cost too much to get that last little bit of perfromance. One can always find a sweet spot, just at the price/performance curve inflection point.
Upgrading is mostly a pipe dream. By the time you want to upgrade, the architecture has evolved and the new sweet spot part is incompatible with your system.
The best strategy could be to buy at the seet spot and replace the whole system more often.
...you'd pay $3,000 for a PC that you'd only use as a boat anchor, nowadays. Now they whine, when all hardware prices have declined markedly?
Had you guys actually read the entire article? He is not talking about buying a high end cpu, he actually mentioned the state of high end cpus sales, so I think that's not the point of discussion.
And getting to the point, the new performance king, the core i7 family, bring benefits only for heavy workloads on cad, 3d rendering and multimidia production... All other mortal being that only do gaming surfing and office tasks on a pc will be more than served with anything from a Q6600/Q8200 to any taste of Phenom.
Even those who cad/render/etc must be really in need of a new CPU to pay the premium for a core i7 motherboard. Cmon, it's insanely overpriced. Anyone who got brains will wait till the Core i7 platform get mainstream prices before getting into that bandwagon. And by that time, if AMD can get in pair with Intel in the performance per buck, I think a lot of Core 2 owners may jump back to AMD.
What are you going to do with that pc that costs over $4,000 US dollars? You are willing to spend $800 on a cpu, wow.
Just how much would you spend if we were not in a recession? lol.
Just what are the other components in your pc that will cost you $3,200/£2,400?
I think you buy a good mid-range pc with a GTX280/295 or HD4870-1GB/HD4850x2-2GB, SSD and SATA hard drive, etc for £1500-£2000 UKP / $2,000-$2,500 USD.
Check out Tomshardware for some info. I like The Inq a lot, but the prices in this article are at contrast to tone of the article.
Why would anyone need to spend a riddiculous amount of money for high or even mid range CPU when for everyday tasks a low-end is just fine? Even gamers dont need to bother because as technogiant observed, most games are console ports anyway... For about one or two years we got huge amount of surplus CPU power thats just not used, consider that the trend is to do a lot of calculations on gpu (10x the power of CPU in some cases) and why would anyone need anything faster than a 2.5Ghz Core 2 Duo?? Future belongs to a processor like Cell (not Cell but similiar) one/two decent cores for "normal" stuff, lots of small cores for specific calculations like graphics etc. Behavior of large chip makers also supports this trend: AMD buying ATI, Intel finally playing with discrete graphics. Only nVidia has a problem, no x86 license and no way to get it means it won't be on the map in the future, shame since its always good to have more competition :(
My family has nine computers. One has a dual core AMD X2 5000+ I got on sale, the rest all all socket A AMD Athlon 3200+ XP CPUs. All have XP Pro and no disk is larger than 160GB. All run so well it's scary and all do exactly what each user wants.
We've all been to Peach Apple here in town and also Circuit City and Best Buy. Not a computer anybody tried in any store was worth buying in their various opinions.
Here's the point. If you have an appliance that operates well, has a whole hoard of spare parts to maintain it, does everything you want done at the pace you want it done ... why change?
Obviously a good portion of the buying public shares that position with us. The same can be said for automobiles, houses, and a whole world of other stuff.
I find it incredibly amusing that the PC/IT world actually thinks it can keep pushing technology for technology's sake. Just watch the market and the news guys, the death spiral of many "old Line" tech shops has just begun.
I have been using an E8400 with Vista Business 64-bit loaded. I like to render math representations of wave mechanics in Mathematica. All I can say is that the E8400 with 2GB of DDRII Ram moans and groans under the load. I would like a Core i7 in a dual socket Zeon package with 24 GB of Ram if I can get it. I think what has happened to the CPU market is that the majority of computer product consumers have progressively set the expectations of what they can get out of a computer lower and lower till the only thing they about their computer they care for is its gaming qualities. I thought that with all the imaginative capability out there that advanced computing capabilities would have freed peoples imagination up to the point where their computer would have allowed a plethora of concepts to be almost immediately virtualized in engineering, rendering and animation software. But the high ground of the industry is instead grounded itself in gaming and unfortunately when real world exigencies come calling, the gaming is the first thing to be thrown overboard leaving no further use for their behemoth “what could have been a very useful tool”. I think that if we as a world re-aligned our priorities toward sustainable development that the need for advanced computing power would once again be coveted by all wishing to be on the frontier of healthier and dynamic new worlds. Well that is at least what I had hoped for.
£300 instead of 3000 - if your pc needs upgrading, most people are buying a decent oc lga 775 motherboard, and a quad core q66600 cpu. These can overclock easily to 3.4-3.6, and with effort 3.8-4.1.
Add a 1gb ati 4850 with decent overclocking, and u have a more than adequate gaming rig for up to 22", 24" at a push but maybe get the 4870.
Stupid inq staff clearly got far more money than sense and have lost sense with reality. Read the forums, q6600 all the way stil dumbass
Student, you sound like you have a decent rig, possibly you just don't have the right graphics card, you may need a FireGL or other professional oriented card that has all the drivers you need to hardware accelerate your software. OpenCL should also help to get more of these CAD programs accelerated by providing a common programming language to graphics cores, which should give that leap of performance you want.