PC CPU Shipments See Steepest Decline in 30 Years
tomshardware.com
tomshardware.com
It used to be you could buy a lot of computer for $2-3K, now that figure is closer to $5K. These prices, combined with the folks that just went through this pain 2 years ago during the pandemic and yeah you aren't going to see stuff flying off the shelves any time soon.
> This expensive tier has the highest possible cards that still maintain a reasonable performance/price. Sure it is pricey, but it is luxurious!
> Expect high performance at 1440p, and solid performance at 4K even in the most demanding games.
For 1865 USD:
> Max most titles at 1440p@144Hz, and solid framerates in 4K, even with max settings.
And if you want to note the 6900XT card for $720 they used here is out of stock then let me note a $700 6950XT: https://www.newegg.com/asrock-radeon-rx-6950-xt-rx6950xt-ocf... which makes it an even better bang for your buck.
Which that $1865 one does not provide. Even before ray tracing, most games struggle to hit the 144 rate you're aiming for, so with ray tracing that drops down to like ~40 (Cyberpunk 2077 for example in that 6900XT card). You have to enable workarounds like DLSS/FSR to make those games playable.
The only way you're getting good framerate at 4k is without ray tracing, but you're paying $2000 to have to worry about still disabling settings? Ridiculous!
So yes, they are overpriced. For $2000 you should not be worried about having to enable FSR.
The usual excuse when this is brought up is "well just don't play those games, they seem unoptimized" to which again, the question is, why are you spending two thousand dollars to avoid playing certain games? How absurd.
You're both just setting an arbitrary baseline of performance at $2k. Arbitrary comparisons cannot be misleading.
When I built my last desktop, in 2015, you would've blown way more than 2k just on the over-the-top monitor that you're mad can't be cheaply populated with high-speed, high-complexity output in 2023. Now you can get a decent quality 4k monitor plus a desktop that will drive it for years of normal tasks, all for less than 1k.
I got my 4k 60Hz monitor in 2017 for $400 or so. You can get them for $250 these days, so I agree that is pretty mid-range by now - or even the lower part of it. That leaves $750 for the computer.
According to the logicalincrements linked above, that gets you a RX 6600 - which they rate for 40 FPS @ 4k in The Witcher 3 - a game which came it out 2015.
So no, you cannot get a decent 4k monitor and a PC able to drive it for less than 1k. That's the entire problem: there is no midrange anymore.
The way the market is structured just doesn't offer a whole lot of reward. Forknife, LoL, CSGO, CoD, etc... Are all built to accommodate toasters. The big titles are are built for consoles and poorly optimized, there isn't a whole lot to be had aside from higher framrates - and many times these are locked.
I upgraded for compute power.
As for resolution I'm not convinced it's worth the upgrade. Maybe in a few years.
For an example, I usually build a PC once the older one is horribly outdated. So that was 1999, 2002, 2006, 2011, and ... Well that one has turned into the PC of Theseus. I upgraded to an SSD and $300 video card in 2018, and in 2022 I bought a new cpu/mobo/ram. Still plays games at 1440p at acceptable frame rates.
If I wanted to game at 4k 240Hz, yeah I'd probably have to spend $3500 (and it still wouldn't run that great) which just tells me that 4k gaming isn't ready for prime time
I think the point is that this isn't true anymore.
In the 80s or 90s eight years was huge in terms of computer hardware advances. In the last eight years though? Meh. Aside from one of my laptops, all of my computers are older than 2015 and they are all perfectly fine for current use. Hardware doesn't advance very quickly anymore, which is great, but bad for sales.
In the '90s, eight years was forever, but less so now.
If you spent over 2k on an over the top monitor in 2015, then you were being silly because even top of the line GPUs weren't hitting 1440 at a stable rate.
We're not talking about normal tasks, if you want normal tasks even a chromebook would be fine. We're talking about intensive tasks, like gaming, which push boundaries and justify the high cost... except for components like GPUs which are dramatically overpriced still. These components make it misleading when people then claim that you can get a top of the line system for under $2k - which is not possible (a top of the line GPU costs more than $2k alone).
You can make tradeoffs, but when paying that much who wants to deal with tradeoffs?
Gaming and TV on the other hand, I'm perfectly happy with a smaller 1080p monitor. There just isn't much to be gained by a few more pixels.
Even just being close in angle would suggest 4k is good.
Text on monitors has traditionally never been able to have crisp curves. High pixel densities help a lot with that.
Mac displays have spoiled me...
You can also save up on the case (cheaper options should be available), and grab a Ryzen 7900 which should have similar perf & comparable price point to Intels they used, and comes with stock cooler, shaving off additional ~$100. I'd also probably skip the HDD and grab 32GB RAM.
The only reasons to replace business desktops are swollen batteries and Microsoft. My teams are responsible for 250k devices globally. Failure rates are <3%, and 75% of failures are batteries and power supplies. With the transition away from spinning rust complete, we have more keyboard failures than desktop PC failure. I’m taking the PC refresh savings and buying Macs, iPads and meeting room hardware.
I'm writing this from my home gaming rig, which is an old, not-cool-enough-for-Win-11 (thank god), desktop. I don't know what I'll be replacing it with when it keels over and dies. Maybe a Mac tower? Maybe a Linux rig. But it'll be my PC, not Microsoft's if I can help it.
Changed to a desktop about 3 years ago and wouldn’t go back unless I really needed that portability again. I had forgotten how much faster a well spec’d desktop machine actually is. And upgrading parts I find a lot better than replacing the whole laptop every 2-3 years.
Currently on a Ryzen 5950x, 64gb ram, multiple gen 4 ssds, and a workstation GPU. The only laptops to beat such a setup in most tasks weigh a lot, cost more than double the desktop, and are 2 years newer.
[0] And/or FreeFileSync or similar for manual operation: I don't want e.g. browser profile data to be synced while the browser is in use, and running the sync manually is no biggie at all.
Apple is conspiciously maintaining some differentiation like larger RAM sizes to force some people to the studio but the distinction really is slim at this point. Better cooling I guess? But M2 is not a hot chip. Maybe a few more thunderbolt ports?
Windows 11 requires TPM 2.0. Windows 11 is the garbage one everyone is going to skip, but will Windows 12 require the same?
But the general point is that they keep coming up with things like this.
Compare modern CPUs to ones from ten years ago and they're maybe twice as fast per core, and have more cores which applications the majority of people use don't support. For most people the ten year old machine is perfectly adequate.
But it doesn't have TPM 2.0 or whatever, and the copy of Windows 7 it came with is no longer supported, so you eventually have to buy a new one (or stop using any supported version of Windows).
It's the same scam with phones but even worse there, because at least I can install an up to date version of Linux on a ten year old PC. Or a twenty year old one for that matter.
What's the failure rate of Macs?
That's because in the race to get the highest benchmark scores, both companies have set the stock clocks to a level that's way beyond what's optimal (eg. adding 100W of power consumption to get 5% higher benchmark scores). The CPUs themselves are fine, you just have to adjust the power/clock limit lower.
Someone on reddit did a power analysis of the 13900K and I reposted it here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34404683 https://www.reddit.com/r/hardware/comments/10bna5r/13900k_po... and it shows the CPU at 100W has 75% of the performance at 40% of the power consumption...
That said, Intel sure has magic dust given how far behind their node disadvantage. Serves them right, though. What a horrible company.
They might be 240W under extreme load, but I can play AAA titles on my i9 at 240hz barely cracking 50% CPU load. And that's with a 3090, so not exactly a mismatched CPU/GPU situation.
At those types of loads the CPU doesn't even try to hit boost clocks most of the time, so you're nowhere near the figures you often see touted based on benchmarks.
This is proven by any outlet which takes the time to measure Performance Per Watt (e.g. https://www.hwcooling.net/en/intel-core-i7-13700k-efficient-...). Intel has consistently driven higher PPW with every generation, when you're comparing like-for-like binned chips. AMD, on the other hand, has been a bigger victim of what the OP is describing; while their raw PPW is generally higher than Intel, so they have room to fall, their Ryzen 7x chips aren't consistently posting higher PPW numbers over Ryzen 5x.
In other words; both Intel and AMD are doing well here. If you're stressing every core on the CPU at 100%, you're going to draw a lot of power, but you're also going to be completing workloads much faster than on 12th or 11th gen, so your aggregate power draw will be lower. The low-tier media outlets that post "OMG 250W" aren't doing research, and also don't care to, because they get clicks from tons of people like the OP who eat outrage at face value.
Intel arc a750 are under $300 and are decent cards for 1080 and do well in 1440. Dx9 support has greatly increased since release.
Going up a little in price, amds 6650 amd 6750 are 3-400.
6800xt are under $600.
> 60% of Steam users have a 1080p monitor as their primary display
1920 x 1200 0.70% +0.01%I don't generally maximize windows across a whole screen except for word (~8 document pages on-screen at once) and visio.
As an extra benefit: I am a sucker for good photos and viewing those on large 4K is way better in my opinion. 4K Youtube and Netflix also looks better.
4 years ago you could get a 1070ti in Canada for $400 new.
The exchange rate is about the same as well.
Fortunately, used 1070s and RX580s are 150CAD (100USD).
The combination of board prices being completely out of whack, and the performance delta of the 3080 over the 3070/2080Ti (made worse by the fact that the 4090 is that leap again over the 3080) being as large as it is, means the value proposition in the middle has disappeared.
It's not that the 3080 isn't worth 700USD or that the current 4000 series cards don't have a similar price/performance ratio- because they very much are priced appropriately; it's that the cheaper new cards (especially the 3070) have a far worse ratio than the expensive ones do. This is also partially why the most popular gaming GPU on Steam is the GTX1650.
And with current-generation console games targeting the equivalent of that 1070/2060, buying anything less than a 3080 is an objectively bad decision, unless you're someone who plays a lot of competitive shooters and thus can benefit from an intermediate for high framerate reasons. (The fact that most of those games aren't particularly fun to play also hurts the hardware industry.)
At this point, I think a buyer might as well get a new 6650XT (~US$260 plus tax) rather than trying to chase a 5-year old, used, half-as-powerful 580.
That space is currently filled by older, slower, less efficient, less-featured last-gen products. Both companies have some significant amounts of inventory they want to burn through after the mining thing and it's going slow because of the general declines in shipments.
Generally though I think people are remembering the past with rose-colored glasses... not saying OP said this in particular, but a lot of people have latched onto the idea of the "$300 x70 tier", and the x70 tier has literally never been $300 MSRP for the entire time it's existed. It's bounced back and forth between $350 and $400 even 10 years ago, $329 was the lowest price it's ever launched at and people have latched onto that one as being the price x70 has to match forever, plus a little extra. GTX 680 (full-die GK104) was $499 10 years ago, for a 300mm^2 chip, GTX 670 was a GK104 cutdown for $399 for example, and GTX Titan was where you got the full GK110 at a mere $999 (in 2012 dollars).
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Nvidia_graphics_proces...
Ampere was somewhat below the baseline, using Samsung was an attempt to make cheaper cards and push down the cost, so by $499 being a "bargain" price (for 3070) before pandemic cost spirals got too bad, and factoring in the more expensive TSMC 5nm node, I think the realistic price for a 4070 (GA104 cutdown, whatever you call it) is probably $600-700 at this point.
So there's definitely some gouging taking place, but, a lot of people are fixated on that $300 number and that's just not going to happen. Costs have just spiraled a lot more than people realize, Pascal was not cheap either and that was 7 years ago (!) this june, and everything since then has been on older, cheaper nodes to help keep the costs down... until now. Throw in the pandemic generally blowing a lot of costs up, and yeah things are expensive now.
And yes, 4850/4870 were good cheap cards, but AMD could do that because they got onto 55nm ahead of NVIDIA, and that was back in the days when shrinking first was a real advantage, you could match a high-end card with a cheap midrange card if you got to a newer node first. That's not how it works anymore, higher wafer costs and R&D costs mean newer nodes are better but they're not really cheaper even considering you get more chips per wafer. Costs are growing fast enough to eat up the increases in density.
From a function standpoint: I'm happy that multiple PCIe slots is still the standard. If I didn't have functional wants such as "more accelerators and more I/O" then I'd go with a cute ITX build.
I did get a compact case recently because 5.25", 3.5", and 2.5" bays are no longer an interesting use case for my daily driver, but now I find that even if I did want to shell out for a new high-end GPU the only model that would fit in my case is a perpetually sold out AIO model.
The cost of actually making a 10gbase-t network card is really not much anymore. All of the cost is licensing.
The $1500 would pay for an AMD 7950X, an ASUS MB with ECC support and a decent configuration of the expansion slots (Prime X670E-Pro), a Noctua cooler suitable for 7950X (e.g. NH-U12A) and 64 GB of ECC DDR5-4800 memory (which for 64 GB costs $100 more than the non-ECC variant).
For the rest, I would continue to use the case, the SSDs, the 10 Gb/s NIC and the GPU that I am currently using.
If I would want to also upgrade the GPU, I would buy a RTX 4070 Ti, for 3 reasons. It provides enough extra performance to make an upgrade worthwhile, it has the best performance per $ among all recent GPUs (at MSRP, a 7900 XTX would have better performance per $, but it can be found only at much higher prices), and lastly, 4070 Ti is the only recent GPU for which the vendor specifies the idle power consumption and the power consumption during light use (e.g. video decoding) and the specified values are small enough to be acceptable in a desktop that is not intended for gaming.
Even if the increase in hardware cost stays at parity with inflation, it’s tremendously more expensive than it used to be, when waiting six months could get you more machines for your budget.
Gaming, a previous driver of high-end consumer growth, has split into truly mobile, consoles, and very high end PCs. But complex games take more capital and time to develop, so recouping costs is important (except if the studio is part of a conglomerate like Microsoft that can weather temporary market forces). I’d imagine that places pressure on game developers to aim for maximum compatibility and a scalable core. So too bad for the Mac, great for phones, and great for consoles (especially with monetizing the back catalog). And new PCs will have to fight against good-enough, and lower demand funding new hardware and software.
Eco mode is a thing for AMD CPUs. There is no point really in not using it by default - benefits are very marginal with power cost being disproportionally huge. And AMD are doing it more for marketing reasons to gain some single digit percentages in benchmarks.
So just enable it (105 W one) and enjoy way more reasonable and efficient power usage with basically almost the same performance.
See some details here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W6aKQ-eBFk0
Wait, what? Yes there are! An AMD Radeon RX 6800 will set you back $480.
What is your criteria for "good" here?
My computer would be, at today's prices, about $1400.
AMD Ryzen 9 5900X 12 core | 32GB DDR4-3600 | 2 x 1TB PCIe gen 4 | Radeon RX 6700 XT 12GB | (Corsair case, PSU and AIO, MSI X570)
My main computer is an M1 MacBook Air which is essentially a perfect computer. It never feels slow. It was a little over thousand bucks. In no world I can imagine could this not be considered an amazing performance value.
Heck, a SoundBlaster Pro sound card was $300 back then (~$670 adjusted for inflation) - the base model for $170 was considered a steal at that price :D And that thing couldn't do half as much as even the cheapo ALC897 sound chip in a basic motherboard.
quick search turns up options for around 500euros
but don't be fooled, 10GbE copper is a power hungry mess. go with lower n-baseT speeds if just want some progression for the last twenty years of networking innovation or invest in optical and get a real upgrade (20/40/100 Gbps)
I have a sprawling homelab and home theater and scarcely need regular 1G. Last summer I transferred a media archive of ~10TB to new hardware, which completed overnight across Cat5. Is there some hot new hobby that generates multi gigabit bursts that I don't know about?
That’s not overnight unless you’re a hell of a sleeper.
On a 10Gig network, assuming no other bottlenecks (harder to do), it’s 2 and a quarter hours.
Personally, I use 10 gig because 100MB/s is really slow. Even 2.5Gb is much, much better and makes it a lot more likely something besides the network is the bottleneck.
I personally move around enough data, it bothers me enough to be worth it.
this is the way
As to why I'm sticking with 10Gbe - I have a 24 port 10GBe switch for the house so going with the kit that matches the network I already have.
I'm wondering if this is the moment for Linux gaming. Valve has certainly taken it a long ways from where it was.
What is this needed for actually, can't these come precompiled with the game, just like the game's executable?
There are 3 brands of GPU so max 3 precompiled versions needed? Is that naive to assume this? CPU's need only one version mostly between AMD and Intel (or at most a few for different SIMD instructions)
Just buy an Intel PCI-E 10g card. They're like $100. Slots on motherboards are meant to be used.
It's crazy that X670E literally has multiple chipsets daisychained together ostensibly to increase expansion capability and yet there's less and less expansion available to end-users. And what there is, is almost entirely blocked by the GPU these days. I would love to see a board with tons of pcie slots attached to the chipset or PCIe switches, but, it wouldn't make the GPU go away for those users who want a discrete GPU.
The only real viable solution I see is thunderbolt, move as much as possible out of the case and break that expansion out as external ports. And tbh the PCIe add-in-card form factor just isn't working for GPUs anymore, the GPU needs to become a standardized module that is connected separately (via riser if desired) and it probably needs a 48V rail. The GPU being 3-4x the TDP of the CPU but completely dimensionally unstandardized and running crazy currents at 12V is not sustainable.
xx80 and xx90s are in the class "If you need to ask the price you cant afford it."
The 4070 Ti is <$1000.
> Want a 10Gb onboard NIC? Be prepared to shell out $1000 just for the motherboard.
Why not just a PCI-e 10GbE NIC on a regular motherboard?
> now that figure is closer to $5K.
I see plenty of prebuilt PCs (eg CyberpowerPC) with 3070 Tis for $2k. 4070 Tis for $2.5k.
BTC hasn't been viable on GPUs for a while, either. It's the Ethereum Proof-of-Stake change that was the most exciting, but it doesn't seem to have had a significant effect, especially with newer (3-4yr old) cards.
Or maybe they just sell them to generative AI farms.
10-15 years ago, people would buy graphics cards to play the latest games on. Epeen was a thing, but limited to just some text in your forum signature.
Now, it seems like half the reason people buy any sort of "status" item is for the clout on Insta. It was eactly the same thing with the PS5 2 years ago - people clamouring for a useless object just to show other people they have it.
At one point you could get a decent gaming pc for about 500 or 600 GBP. I doubt that's possible now. And madness compared to the hardware in a Xbox series X. Yes I know it's hardware is subsidized.
Even on LAN do you have I/O that can deliver 10gb/sec to the wire?
I've got an ICX7250-24p at home that cost about $200 from ebay. That's 24 ports of PoE gigabit, plus 8 SFP+ ports for 10gig. Noise and power are quite reasonable, though it doesn't belong on the desk next to you.
For example, The Radeon 6700 XT 12GB was commonly $900+ during the crypto boom, but is regularly around $350 now. That's a pretty big drop.
"Current generation" - only very expensive high end models have been announced (and some aren't selling as low as MSRP yet.)
RTX 4070 Ti $800 | RX 7900 XT $900 | RX 7900 XTX $1000 | RTX 4080 $1200 | RTX 4090 $1600
You have to stick to last generation for excellent performance with less insane pricing.
this tech is bad. awful. only worth for casual games which are already well served by comon hardware localy.
its all a ruse to try to sell idle capacity for their gpu farms because AI model training hype never materialized
Even for casual gaming it was horrible. Can't imagine something multi player.
As long as they’re 64 bit builds, MacOS’s Rosetta translation layer does a great job of running then without a hitch.
Apple Silicon is a beast. I wish more developers would take advantage of it.
Edit: "Why do you need 3 computers?" - I regularly switch between Windows, Ubuntu & MacOS, and I don't like dinking with switching my monitor inputs, dual booting or remoting in. Rather just swivel my chair. Yes I fully realize how ridiculous this is. Some people like nice cars. I like wasting money on computers apparently. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
It's consumer electronics. Not very useful for people who want to build things containing a CPU/GPU.
The fact you never installed a game is largely irrelevant.
Suggests a correction precipitated by panic-buying during the supply chain chaos of the pandemic era. Too soon for doom and gloom for the PC market just yet. Mobile devices have been dominating PCs since long before 2020, and if revenues were still growing in the past decade then there's nothing to suggest that this moment is suddenly the inflection point where the whole thing will come tumbling down, even if you do believe that something like that is inevitable.
Only Apple has been relatively flat, and probably only they and Samsung are very profitable.
Most of the profitability in "PC" (GPU/CPU) has really been datacenter for 5 years. Again, Intel executed badly, but the decision to focus on datacenter was right.
According to wikipedia they use chips from Broadcom. I'm not sure how a small company being able to make SBCs using chips from a massive multinational is indicative of how easy it is for cloud vendors to "make their own chips".
Also, it feels like phones have entered that "Core 2 Duo" PC stage where upgrades don't really matter as much any more. I know software support can still be an issue, but at least on the iPhone side, I don't feel like I need to upgrade before my phone loses OS support.
I suspect you also have something of a generational thing with many younger students not even using PCs.
visa and mastercards will not last another decade if hardware sales don't pick up soon.
These figures exclude ARM CPUs, another possibility is that lots of people are switching/buying ARM devices.
COVID/WFH Panic Purchasing for work and school at home. COVID Cash also put money into peoples hands to buy stuff, like computers. Crypto mining and GPU shortage was also a factor. As people were buying systems and parts for speculation. People were buying prebuilt computers to mine or simply get the GPU. Scalpers made everything worse, messing with parts in the supply chain.
So there is the supply and demand factors, and the extra money for consumers and the speculation for crypto, and it was a perfect storm.
Marginal costs outweigh the benefits so why would people buy? This is simple economics and they know this, but they still price fix because they must meet their minimum profits whatever that may be.
Its a common problem with monopolies, as soon as the market place shrinks to only a few players, where the means of production has been concentrated, those people then start dictating prices and may collude without even needing some conspiratorial agreement.
Many people also ignore the fact that Intel ME/AMT and the AMD equivalent features that cannot be disabled, are not documented, and are primary targets; are becoming more well known, and in general people don't want it.
Businesses may find value in those features, but individuals find cost (i.e. their privacy, and greater future risks that are unquantifiable).
They've broken their own market, and the rot will only get worse for them since its unlikely they will right the course. Many IT people wonder if there isn't some secret government mandate requiring these companies to embed management co-processors. It is clearly offering only minimal value to IT, and its seen as a cost for individuals that know about it.
They really need to reconsider their actual market instead of the fairy magic kingdom type thinking they have been following.
All 4 of us work in big tech companies, have 6 figure take home pay even after expenses. I don't mind paying high prices due to shortages. Lockdowns were BS and I was continuing to eat out regularly at restaurants from September 2020 to present in a state with lax mask requirements. Only 1 of the 3 friends lost any money in crypto, and it was a very small amount compared to his annual income.
Just because you and your social sphere don't fully appreciate the privacy implications of CSME and ST, which again, aren't the same as AMT, doesn't mean nobody else cares about them. Have you considered that it might be you who is in the bubble?
I worked in a computer store for four years. I probably helped thousands of customers in that period.
None of these concerns ever came up from what I can recall. Not even once. People ask about all sorts of things and I've answered my share of questions about Linux and even FreeBSD, but never this.
Are there some people concerned about this to the point they don't purchase x86 chips? Obviously yes. Is it a broadly held concern? Doesn't seem like it.
Being in the top 1% of global income, and top 5% of US income, is definitely being inside a bubble.
Your threads will be scheduled all over the place pretty randomly. So I'm not yet convinced it's going to be better than stock 7950X with higher clocks across the board. Actual benchmarks will tell.
Is the simulation just extremely CPU-intensive?
They are artificially keeping GPU prices high, so people don't want to buy GPUs.
And if they don't want to buy a GPU then they don't want the thing that the GPU goes in.
PCs have simply become fast enough over the past 10 years and there's been no "Windows Vista"-moment that forced users to migrate to new hardware en masse. A 5 year old system will simply feel pretty much the same to the average user as a brand spanking new one. There's only so many video editors and professional gamers/streamers who thirst after the latest hardware.
This is in line with comments from Drew Prairie (AMD’s VP of communications): [1]
> We are shipping below consumption because there is too much inventory in the channel and that partners want to carry lower levels of inventory based on the demand they are seeing
[1] https://www.pcworld.com/article/1499957/amd-is-undershipping...
i was already sitting at a desk, so ergonomically it’s identical.
now i can compile blender in 20 seconds and fly around with eevee. i can compile linux with custom lsm modules.
dual ssd makes it easy to dual boot. reboot into windows and i can have a magical evening.
7950x, 4090, 990 pro. it would be great if these were cheaper, then more people could afford to use them. it’s also ok that they are overpriced. cest la vie.
to anyone spending a majority of their life on a computer and making money, the cost of your primary computer doesn’t matter unless it’s ludicrous.
the opportunity cost is far higher. what might you have learned had you tinkered with blender or a kernel when you were bored?
Pretty sure hardware speed is not the main thing holding people back from doing this. Apple silicone is also just getting too good.
I will buy a new CPU when you offer one without Intel (CS)ME / AMD Secure Technology (formerly PSP).
Until then, I will never buy a new x86 processor ever again.
Sincerely, - A larger chunk of your potential customers than you think
Reality is probably 2000 people max. Wouldn't even be worth having a meeting to discuss a new product line.
Not to mention that both team blue and team red could charge something of a fortune of a "privacy premium" for not including these much-despised coprocessors. Consider one of the only remotely comparable semi-modern options - IBM's Power 9 processors. Midrange versions of these processors and their motherboards each start in the thousands of dollars. For a Ryzen 9 7950x with no AMT ST (PSP) or Microsoft Pluton, I'd eagerly jump at the opportunity to purchase one for $2500.
Back to your estimate - even for consumer demand, your estimate is easily dismissed by simply looking at the existence of companies like RaptorCS, Purism, and the like. In addition, there is enterprise purchasing demand in the hundreds of millions, easily. Google was attempting to remove all proprietary blobs from their servers a few years ago (2017, if memory serves correctly), and ME/PSP was the big barrier they couldn't overcome at the time.
Make no mistake, there isn't a single tech company that wouldn't leap on such coprocessor-free compute to protect sensitive corporate secrets.
> this doesn't require a new product line, or any new features, just removing an existing component that costs more to add in
That seems wrong. Even having a new SKU has some overhead in terms of any manual process (such as making product brochures). Plus, are they going to silently make this hypothetical ME-less CPU, or are they going to try to do some outreach to interested buyers? If not, what's the point? That costs money too. Oh, and they'll need a separate line for packaging these CPUs. And lastly, adding a post-process way to remove ME is potentially a security issue, because maybe people in high-security environments (who likely pay more than people such as yourself who want ME-less) would be worried about an attacker slipping a ME-less CPU in and doing something nefarious.
Anyway, TL;DR: it's not enough to prove that there are people interested in a ME-less CPU. Heck, if it's $1, I'll buy one for the hell of it. It's a question of how much more they're willing to pay, and how much more it'll cost Intel to deliver such a CPU. And we have precious little info to go on, so your argument is hardly a slam-dunk.
Edit:
> there isn't a single tech company that wouldn't leap on such coprocessor-free compute to protect sensitive corporate secrets
Really? Corporations are worried about ME? First I've heard of it. These are the same companies that willingly use Azure and AWS, right? Can you provide some evidence?
I wish this were true, but in reality it's pretty far from that. What do you count the tens or hundreds of thousands of potential customers amongst the sea of tens or hundreds or thousands of millions of real customers? A rounding error.
A huge chunk of their market _wants_ these features, another huge chunk just doesn't care, and there's a small (and at times very passionately vocal) minority that cares and doesn't want them.
But this is all setting up for a response to:
> Until then, I will never buy a new x86 processor ever again.
Don't hold your breath; It's not likely you'll ever have the opportunity to spend your money on x86 with the given conditions.
There may only be tens or hundreds of thousands of customers, but tens of those customers are going to want hundreds of thousands of individual units. I have no doubt annual sales for modern X86 silicon without the "security" coprocessors would be in the millions of units for the first few years, at a minimum.
There are no new AMD or Intel processors that come without ST (formerly PSP) or CSME (formerly ME).
>The management engine that included in chipsets can be switched off permanently.
This is factually incorrect. me_cleaner cannot neutralize or disable modern CSME, there is no way to verify the HAP bit does anything at all, nor that the included TCP/IP stack on the Minix OS cannot accept remote commands to disable the HAP bit, if set. To our current knowledge, only the onboard GbE controller is accessible to CSME's TCP/IP stack, but we're working with extremely limited information. These are closed-source, hardened opaque-boxes that are deliberately designed to be inauditable and tamper-proof. Adding firmware support for other ethernet controllers or wireless cards would conceivably be trivial.
>In general usage, it does not matter while you use third party controlled CAs, distro repositories and automatic updates,
I compile from source. OS, drivers, browser - all of it. I don't care if you think this is "unrealistic for the average user", my objective is not to have the security model that the average user has.
>not speaking about microsoft, google, nvidia, valve, mozilla spyware that can do anything with your data anytime they (or US/EU government agencies) want.
I do not run Windows, I do not use chromium (or firefox) based browsers, I do not use a discrete GPU, I don't have anything remotely gaming related (like steam) installed.
What I do have is a constitutional right to privacy that does not end where my CPU begins, and an unshakeable resolve wherein I refuse to voluntarily cede that right to privacy just because so many others do.
Anger might help, if channeled properly into lobbying your representatives in Congress. Making up imaginary constitutional rights to a DRM-free PC won't help at all, though. Intel and AMD have the right to shove their spyware into their silicon, just as Microsoft has the right to shove theirs into their OS. You have the right to decline to buy it. Your rights end there, given that nothing they are doing is actually illegal.
That last part could change, which is why I recommend lobbying. It should be completely illegal to use a Wintel PC for a vast number of things that people are currently using them for, from healthcare to government services to military applications. If we can convince Congress of the threat, they can pass legislation that will wreck the business model of anyone who doesn't give the user -- or at least the admin -- control over what information the PC sends out and what it can receive. They will change their tune in a hurry when that happens.
That sounds good yet in practice even medical hippa privacy is bunk. Last week I went to a big hospital for a walk-in xray. They refused to take the pictures until I consented to their standard forms which provide for my results to be given to unnamed research groups. The check-in person acted like I was the first person ever to try to strike out that part of the form/contract. They literally refused treatment and the 'patient advocate' played her role of being pleasant and clueless.
I complained to hospital licensing at State which was rejected because it was not an unsafe care issue.
Correct.
>just as Microsoft has the right to shove theirs into their OS
Correct.
>You have the right to decline to buy it.
Ding ding ding!
>Your rights end there, given that nothing they are doing is actually illegal.
Correct. I am making a market demand with my money, not a legal order for these companies to stop producing untrustworthy hardware and snoopy software.
I am not a big fan of ARM as many ARM chips have a TrustZone core, which is in the same camp as (CS)ME and AMD ST (PSP).
Fun fact: AMD ST (PSP) is actually implemented using an ARM TrustZone core.
We cannot read the source of CSME or AMD ST firmware. We cannot inspect what it is doing.
I can read the source of all firmware for all parts of my CPU. I can inspect what it is doing.
This is what the benefit really boils down to - it's not a guarantee of security, but it is a guarantee you can actually audit what your silicon is doing.
Decades ago I did similar things, but the cadence was much faster (annual sometimes); my conclusion, like that of many others, is that PCs are usable for much longer these days. A net positive I believe.
100% this. If my motherboard hadn't started to slowly fail (been running on the backup BIOS for the past year), I'd still use my 2013 Xeon system. It's still fast enough for daily use and as long as I'm not recompiling large codebases, it's still fine today.
I plan on using my new rig for at least 6 to 8 years as well. The times when CPU performance literally doubled every other year are simply over. For the average user, literally any mainstream CPU released in the past 5 to 8 years will actually do just fine (stuff like high-end gaming and video editing aside).
I want to upgrade (held off while buying a house and moving/renovating) now I finally can...I realised the only game I play a lot isn't even capped by my current hardware so there just is no incentive to upgrade.
Right now the only compute upgrade I need is a GPU and I think that applies to a lot of people.
But damn if it hasn't been hard to get a good deal on a GPU these last couple of years...
if you are starting from zero today, then it seems very rough indeed. but for a vast majority, minus the bloated applications people can get away with today, most people are just fine with what they already got.
in terms of gamers, i am amazed by one group excited by steam deck and happy to live with its limitations, while another group wants the bleeding edge and demanding 4080/4090 performance for much less. in a day and age where even cyberpunk can be played on integrated graphics, we still stress on having a graphics card.
for ai or other "production" workloads, unless you're starting from scratch, things remain as they had in the past: you pay more to save time. i personally chose to skip tensor cores for my machine to save on costs, but it should not be holding me back when i really need to train a large model. i am not sure how many people would actually be using their hardware for long enough to justify the "10 month" rule on buying v/s renting.
as far as the main topic is concerned, cpu has become way too good way too quickly. only a few years ago we just had minor bumps on 8 threads for the consumer space. fortunately bloat hasn't advanced as much.
Gotta have those clicks coming. This is all just reversion back to pre-2020 normal.
A positive outlier in the last year leads to a negative one in the current.
I wonder if it comes to that…
Planned obsolescence in hardware is already here...
Outside of fairly niche uses (4K, actual heavy compute) even an older CPU is fine. Won't hold forever...but longer.
For example: you can't just throw a Birdnet-Pi (https://birdnetpi.com/) image on a normal PC and run it. There is plain Birdnet but it doesn't have any of the automation or the web interface for use Birdnet-Pi does. Instead it's pages worth of complex multi-argument commands you'd have to customize and you'd have to port the web interface yourself.
Since most people want rpis for little projects like this a normal PC massively increases the complexity.
High prices are because they've been getting scalped on the secondary market, so I wouldn't say that means they are "available."
The Honeycomb LX2 is probably the closest thing to that currently, but it launched for $750 and has since gone up to around $920. Performance is not remotely competitive with x86 systems at that price point.
There are some systems based on the Ampere Altra chips, but nobody sells the motherboards/CPUs on their own and a full system will run you at least ~$6000.
[0] https://www.adlinktech.com/products/Computer_on_Modules/COM-... [1] https://www.adlinktech.com/Products/Computer_on_Modules/COM-...
Same applies to smartphones.
Breaking both down we have 3 things to take note of:
i5/i7 - indicates relative performance or feature set within a given generation, bigger is generally better
13/7 - the generation of processor
600/700 - where Intel rates a given processor within a generation, this is consistent and doesn’t (to my knowledge) involve overlap between i3/5/7/9 - generally bigger is better.
So i5-13600 is a thirteenth gen i5, type 600. i7-7700 is a seventh gen i7, type 700
Then you get the legion of letter suffixes determining other features, mobile SKUs etc.
What used to be the i7 was (like with the i7-7700) now occupied by the i9 line
The value price of the 12600k is just much better
i5-13600k is around 38000 points (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i5-13600...)
i7-7700k is around 9600 points (https://www.cpubenchmark.net/cpu.php?cpu=Intel+Core+i7-7700K...)
So the new i5 is nearly 4x faster than the old i7. New CPUs have come a long way over the last few years.
Looking up the numbers instead of reading them like tarot cards, I can tell you that the i7 7700 is a 8 core processor with a max turbo frequency of 4.20 GHz, and the i5 13600 is a 14 core with 6 cores that can do 5 GHz, and 8 efficiency cores capped at 3.7GHz. And both support VT-d, which is about the only feature I would care about :D
In general, you can only infer very little from the marketing names. To have any actual idea, you have to look at benchmarks. In practice, 13600 is ~70% faster per thread, and has 2.5 times the threads.