What has happened to Intel lately?

[MayImilae]

drhycodan Wrote:Ever since the original Core i7, these newer 2nd, 3rd, and 4th gen i7's barely improve upon the original i7 in performance.

Uh, wrong. The first gen is Nehalem-Westmere, the second gen Sandy Bridge-Ivy Bridge, the third gen is Haswell-Broadwell. Sandy Bridge was a HUGE leap in performance. So you're wrong there.

Still, starting with Ivy performance gains per iteration have slowed down. But it isn't so clearcut... All speed gains are just efficiency gains. Think about it. Improved efficiency means you can do more with the same resources in the same time period. Simple. Well, Intel is focusing more on laptops and tablets lately to try to stop the advance of ARM. So while they are always marching forward with efficiency, now they are shifting more and more of that efficiency away from performance and using it to reduce power consumption and increase battery life. It's not that they've slowed down their advancement, they just have other things to worry about.

The only solution is for AMD to step up their game and start challenging them in CPU performance again. Considering how far they have fallen behind, that could be pretty rough. Right now they aren't even trying to challenge in CPU power, and are focusing on low cost bundles and their better onboard GPUs.