EUV Lithography combined with new packaging strategies will be able to boost performance. Once software starts being written specifically for these systems will it will be painful to go back to 2006 era hardware… It’s just life.

I find that once you hit 3Ghz, even on a 16 year old machine, that it’s “good enough” to be honest. Throw in a modern GPU, and some kind of solid state storage, and it performs pretty well. My maxed out 2006 MacPro is honestly fine enough for day to day tasks, where my newer dual Xeon really shines is video encoding and parallel builds, it’s where the 16 cores / 32 threads really get a chance to do their job.

If anything it really goes to show that CPU’s for the most part really haven’t improved all that much, although going wider at least helps with some things. It’s almost embarrassing how poorly Intel has let AMD run ahead with honestly far superior data centre processors.

These older high-end parts still do great, in spite of the current core count wars. I’m writing this from my main system, an i7-6700 non K, which I have nothing to complain about despite running quite a few CPU-heavy workloads recently. Of course, Intel’s stagnation meant that back then, you could go straight for the current i7 model (only one!) if you wanted *the* best desktop CPU available, and now you have to pick between Intel, AMD, 8, 12 or 16 cores… But competition is good.

I thought the 980s would be too old for the bit coin insanity. Although the 1080s still fetch crazy dollars, and despite all the 1030,1050,1060 and variants there is no 1080 anything.

For home I picked up a RTX 2770, which I even feel is overpriced, but that raytraced quake 2 is amazing.

Oh yeah and we surely hit peak computing 2006 or so. My 2006 Mac pro after a Xeon refresh, cleaning out and now a 1050 and the latest windows 10 with a SSD is just fine. The m.2 storage on my Japanese i7 is insanely fast. I’m probably next time going to get some pci express cards and m.2 all my old stuff. I only have one machine with one slot that is in current use.

I don’t think we are going to have anything as significant as the 386 or first Gen amd64 in a long while. Although 256bit++++ fpus would be nice.

My newest computer is 4 years old, my primary control laptop that I use the most is about 6 years old, both i7s (one generation apart). Processor speed plateaued around then and everything Intel has added since has just been gimmicks that aren’t useful outside of extremely specialized applications. The real development has been in graphics cards and storage, but both of those are diminishing returns because only the high end cards have the features, and only the early adopters buy them, so companies have no reason to put the effort to take advantage of those features. The storage innovations are only useful for servers.