Sunday 23 October 2011

Waiting for Ivy Bridge

Waiting for Godot Ivy Bridge.

Technology has gotten so good that it's competing with itself;
The release date for Ivy Bridge CPUs nears, yet i still don't see any new features that lack from my C2D setup.
Of course, IB will have more power, lots more, and lower temperatures (so low in fact that many once-awesome aftermarket coolers are now totally redundant.. once you get your hands on a Coolermaster Hyper 212+, you are set for life), much better memory controllers (i'm actually hoping to see DDR4 with IB), more overcloclability... in fact, IB will be *exactly* like SB, but better in everything, if by little.

And of course the first thing that comes to mind is the Tic-Toc, where CPUs are designed in two steps, one of architectural change, and one of die shrink and refinement; knowing how things work, do you opt for the Tic, the new technology with new features, or do you wait for the Toc, which at the same price point delivers better performance and has less bugs'n kinks?

Now i would have gone Sandy bridge long ago were it not for that i was broke, and couldn't afford to even think about it - which leaves me to consider the Toc, as it's not a good idea to get one now since IB is "just around the corner" (IB has been "JATC" since jan, but whatever).. however here comes the big if:

Should i go Ivy bridge??

As people say on Hardforum, "i'm concerned that these chips will be made to not be any faster than Sandy Bridge" - of course, why whould Intel want to compete with itself, expecially now that AMD is nowhere to be seen and SB chips could be still sold successfully for another couple years.
Well, they won't be revolutionary, but they will certainly be better than SB. In fact you *will* get a lot more, mostly out of the new chipset; the problem here isn't whether Ivy Bridge will be lots better than Sandy Bridge - it will be at least a little better, and that's all that matters - but it's if Ivy Bridge will finally manage to make my C2D setup feel old. Will it?

You see, i'm working and gaming on a 5 year old machine, with a 280GTX bought on eBay for £50, and everything still works perfectly.

Many years ago,in the infancy of computers, things used to go horribly wrong - in fact, the was hardly ever a platform that didn't have several things going horribly wrong at once, and each technological step-up would fix only a few of these, often adding a couple more in for good measure..
But around the years of WinXP SP2, and the C2D, everything started to fall into place.. OSs were stable, hardware got its bugs sorted out, and essentially my machine can do everything that any modern one can.. in the same way. Maybe, just maybe, a very little slower but, hey, is that really worth two grand????

Here is an example (if i find it): FLASH/NAND based storage, or SSDs to us, hailed as revolutionary, "hard disk has always been a bottleneck", "you will be amazed at the speed" and all that shit.
Mind you, a decent SSD today is around £400.
Then, you get articles like this one Anandtech forums:
I got an SSD, why doesn't Windows boot much faster?
And Lol 'n behold, your £400 doesn't actually do anything that you can see.


Cue excruciating explanation of this new and amazing technology that offers very little real life improvement, unless you have ADD and really think its ok to spend £400 to wait two seconds instead of three to watch a film on your computer.


So, will Ivy Bridge truly outperform my Core2Duo ? 


Honestly, i don't know. I almost hope it does, because CPUs have become less and less of an interest for me since this build, as i hardly feel that i have a need for more computing power. Ask me, and i can easily tell you the Nvidia 560Ti is the best GPU on the market, and yet, why would i want to buy one?? I still play everything that comes out ..


And again.. i mostly just play QL ...