Hacker News Reader

Comment by Ekaros | Hacker News Reader

The inflation has really hit the consumer market... 700$ for CPU and over thousand for GPU... Memory is not cheap either...

Not that it won't sell, but still these price points for something still called consumer start to be high. You could get a whole portable PC for same money.

View on HN

You're wrong here. This is top-of-the line enthusiast CPU. They always have costed around 1k$, see e. g. Intel Core i9 Xtreme lineup (the chips with 'X' designation here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Intel_Core_i9_processo...).

You can have absolutely fine 8c16t CPU which will handle anything you can possibly throw at it for 230$ from Amazon (https://www.amazon.com/AMD-Ryzen-5800X-16-Thread-Processor/d...).

I was actually wondering what the original Extreme Edition P4s retailed for a couple of decades ago, and it turns out to be $999. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

The big cache version of the Pentium Pro (512kB) was 1,217 USD (1996) - 2320 USD (2023) with inflation.

Is it? Have a look at this article from 2002:

> With the cuts, the wholesale cost of a 733-MHz Pentium III drops 3 percent, from $776 to $754, while the 700-MHz version drops 3 percent from $754 to $733 in volume.

https://www.cnet.com/culture/intel-cuts-pentium-iii-prices-1...

$754 in today's dollars is over $1250.

Cutting edge processors are cheaper than they were 20 years ago.

Indeed. People forget that flagship Intel Extreme Edition or AMD Athlon FX chips from ~17 years ago were retailing for over 1000$ in the money of that time. In today's roubles they would be around 1500$ adjusted for inflation. Ouch!

Today 750$ for a flagship CPU that buys you the best possible compute in the consumer space is not a bad deal at all. It's never been a better time for X86 CPU shopping. You most likely don't need to buy the most expensive flagship CPU. There's great options for every budget.

The GPU market on the other hand is completely fucked. In 2007 you could get a 8800 GTS for 360$ (520$ today) giving you near flagship performance.

I feel like AMD and Intel are competing in the CPU space while AMD and Nvidia entered in a gentlemen's agreement to control the GPU market.

Yeah, the "top of the line" processors were often insanely priced (and some were not available for love or money, basically paper launches only available to those with connections).

https://www.redhill.net.au/iu.php is a good read down memory lane about those things, even as far back as the 286 you had it. Sometimes very rarely and almost as a mistake the "best bang for the buck" processor AND the "fastest in the world" would overlap.

I paid a bit more than that for my current 5950X a couple years ago now. Top of the stack CPUs have always had a pretty big price jump. Though, I would class the 7950X(3D) as similar to HEDT even if it's the top of the consumer models... if you don't need a ton of i/o, there's a lot of value there depending on what you're doing.

GPU pricing seems a bit more insane, given a lot of the demand has actually died down at this point, and the mfgs are definitely restricting production to keep prices (and margins) up. It's kind of sad there really isn't anything comparatively good on the lower pricing end ($100-300) where historically you'd see around 60-70% the performance well under half the price.

$700 topish tier CPUs are nothing new. The Pentium 4 Extreme Edition had a $1000 MSRP for instance. Even in 2004 you could get an entire laptop for the money, even an Apple laptop with the base model iBook G4 selling for $1000. There is still good CPUs in the $100-$300 range.

GPU prices have gone insane though with mid-range having somehow moved up to $400-$500 where high-end was a decade ago.

The GPU market is definitely suffering from having only one dominant player. I'm hoping that AMD is able to invest some of the extra cash flow since the introduction of Ryzen toward making their GPUs fully competitive with NVIDIA rather than having to play catch up all the time. Also, NVIDIA kind of has to price gouge on this generation because they made so much money during COVID and the crypto boom. Unless they want to be like Zoom or Peloton and lose 75+% of their market cap, they have to keep the profit curve from plunging. And they know there's latent demand from gamers who were priced out of the market before, plus pretty strong interest from the AI side, so why not keep the prices high to maximize profit?

I also think another factor in the rise of GPU prices is how quickly things have been moving on the display front. Not only did we go more or less directly from 1080p to 4K, thereby quadrupling resolution, now we're not shooting for 30 or even 60 fps minimums anymore. We want 1% lows to be above 120, 144, or even 240fps so that our high refresh rate monitors are properly fed. Oh, and we don't want to turn down image quality while doing it. Now throw in VR, where high-end headsets can be 4K or more per eye, and you've got a lot of pixels to push. So top-end GPUs have to be these behemoths with several kg of cooling hanging off of them, because they are now the biggest power consumer in the system. Yet they still have to fit into the real estate allotted to just a few peripheral slots, usually in an orientation that's not optimal for airflow. It's quite the engineering challenge, and I kind of see why GPUs at every level have gotten so expensive, since they're all priced relative to the top range.

This is true for the high-end, but at the same time, for about 180€ you can get a last gen 5700G which has nice performance and can play most games. Or you get the normal but more powerful CPU for that price and combine it with an ARC GPU. It's not as cheap as it once was, but it's not that bad.

Flagship CPUs/GPUs have always be considered enthusiast/prosumer level with relatively dubious performance/value propositions.

The first Core i7 extremes (which fill roughly the same product niche) were ~$1000 like over 10 years ago (https://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-990x-extreme-ed...)

> 700$ for CPU

This is a flagship CPU part. Consumer is a broad segment. Even the peasants like shiny things every now and again.

You could get something that would be imperceptibly-slower for most workloads and fits into the same socket for less than $300.

>>You could get a whole portable PC for same money.

Not with the same performance you cant...

Not even close

>>The inflation has really hit the consumer market... 700$ for CPU and over thousand for GPU...

$700 for the Top of the line CPU is actually low, at the highest of intel monopoly period they were charging well in excess of $1000 (closer to $1700 if I remember) for their I7 K line enthusiast PC's.. Even today $700 is cheap compared to the Threadripper line AMD seems to have given up on.

I see much more affordable CPUs on that list. You can buy those instead of the best of the best.

The challenge is compounded by the fact that you need to buy a whole host of new parts at the same time. A new motherboard to handle AM5, DDR5 memory, and most likely a new PSU given how power hungry CPUs and graphics cards have become.

Nope. Ryzen 5 5600 6c/12t is 135eur.

i5 12400f 6c/12t is 155 eur.

You can get 8c/16c for a bit more, 5700x for 190eur.

Value DDR4 16/32gb kit and a reasonable basic mobo will give you an amazing system.

The only thing which still is kind of pricey is GPUs.

This 700eur cpu is the very upper end of consumer market.

5800x3D 8c/16c for 300eur is the most I would spend personally.

I mean, this is a flagship CPU, up around Xeon Gold capabilities. Plenty of Ryzen3/5 for a deal out there for a good computer otherwise

I think the worst part is not the high flagship price. It’s that prices don’t fall for generations the same way they used to.

A better example would be the 4070ti really, 700$ for a 70-class GPU.

my 350Mhz Pentium 2 cost about $700. So did my 19" CRT monitor..

Reply on news.ycombinator.com