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Is it me or is CPU tech going nowhere te past 2 years? I bought a phenom ii x4 955 2-3 years ago for $180, and they are still available for $130. Same with core2 processors and athlon ii. It seems that they are just adding cores now, and not really developing anything new.

What do you all think?

It's definitely slowing down a bit. Getting to the point that the average user doesn't need any more & there aren't enough power users to push the market. Well that & the smaller processes are getting difficult to get more speed out of. Going parallel is becoming the name of the game (expect 8 & 16 core processors soon).

BUT there is a WORLD of difference in performance between my old Core 2 Duo Quad 6600 and my newer Core i7 860.

On surface it may not seem so (both are 2.8GHz cores) but speed is misleading nowadays. There are some really big differences between the two technologies other than an extra 4 threads.

The real problem is there's really no way to differentiate anymore. Clock speed is meaningless.

FlyingPenguin wrote:BUT there is a WORLD of difference in performance between my old Core 2 Duo Quad 6600 and my newer Core i7 860.

I'm still using my Q6600 that I bought 3 years ago now. Don't plan to upgrade anytime soon.

After clock speeds hit about 3ghz, they stopped pushing speed & started pushing architecture. Some are good & some not much better. There is a pretty good leap in the "i" series from Intel as well as the Phenom II's even if the speed is still low. In the end though, it's not like it used to be where you'd double actual performance ever year or two. That's to be expected though. In fact, they've done pretty well considering how difficult it is work at the current process sizes.

Executioner wrote:I'm still using my Q6600 that I bought 3 years ago now. Don't plan to upgrade anytime soon.

I still have mine also. I'm actually thinking about upgrading this year but I can't justify dumping $600 to $800 to get something better than what I already have. I'm hoping that some PC games come out soon that will tax my system to the point that necessitates an upgrade. So far though, I should be able to run everything.

The technology has improved with processors being more efficient. The architecture also allows for faster encoding and rendering for those programs that take advantage of it.

Q6600 is still a great CPU. Frankly, a more cost effective upgrade would be a newer video card and waiting for affordable Sandy Bridge processors and mobos for the next upgrade. I usually like to skip a CPU generation.

In my case I was interested in speeding up trans-coding and rendering of videos. The i7 really shines in that department when combined with a video transcoder that supports multiple cores, and the trusty Q6600 replaced my old workbench PC. The Q6600 does a better job running VMWare than my old single core bench PC.

My new home media server is my old Q6600 w/4GB of DDR2 and an 8800GT lol

eGo

Heh. I've got an 8800GT in my Q6600 bench PC as well. Great card for it's time.

Executioner wrote:I'm still using my Q6600 that I bought 3 years ago now. Don't plan to upgrade anytime soon.

Ditto on the Q6600.

If I can ever find an inexpensive Core 2 Duo, I'll drop it in my Acer rig and buy a new motherboard so I can overclock the Q6600.
From what I've read the Q6600s keep pace with the Phenom IIs when they are at the same core speed.
I haven't seen any Core 2 Duos less then $129 and I don't think they are that much faster then the Intel Dual Cores to justify double the price.

Im still running my 8800GT in my main rig. I haven't found a reason yet to upgrade. Hell my main rig is still DDR2.

How about that. Ask & you shall receive. This is quite revolutionary in fact.

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