Quote Originally Posted by saaya View Post
thats not true, i upgraded from a cheap athlonxp system to a cheap 754 system and the performance boost was quite noticeable... and going from 939 to c2d was quite a boost as well...

going from p3 to athlon or p4 was a big boost
going from athlon to athlonxp was a minor boost
going from athlon xp to k8 was a big boost
going from k8 to k10 was a minor boost
going from k10 to k10.5 was a minor boost
going from core2 to corei7 was a minor boost

lately the perf boosts by new cpus are smaller and smaller... cause they push for more and more cores which dont help in most scenarios, and most software is now written for mainstream, to run on as many systems as possible, even 5 year old ones... i guess those are the reasons...

there was a notable performance boost in my experience...
but yes, its not like you ever needed the latest gen cpu to really do something you couldnt do before...

yeah but what will sata3 and usb3 be good for i ask you... running several ssds in raid maybe, but who does that? and will it really make a notable diference?
and usb3... faster external hdds, but do we really need that?
P3 and Athlon were neck-to-neck most of the time, LOL! Fastest Athlons were usually ahead of the P3 by about 50Mhz, beating it to 1GHz in April, 2000. When Athlon was first released, it came in 550, 600, and 650 Mhz variants, to counter Intel's 550Mhz P3.

Just some good ol' nostalgia!

It all depends on what matters to you the most. What defines the biggest boost for you? Some boosts are "feature" boosts, like PCI-E over AGP, SATA over IDE, DDR2 over DDR, etc.. Some are sheer speed boosts, like going from a 500MHz P3 to a 2GHz AthlonXP, to a 3GHz AthlonX2, finally to a 4GHz Corei7. Some of us do not need those boosts, but some upgrade because those boosts are needed so badly, even if it's only for 1 favorite game.

SATA3 will be the "feature boost" next year, while USB3.0 will probably come the year after, in 2012, given the snail-pace progress of finalizing and approving specifications + delays.. and PCI-3.0 might come out sooner than that. We'll just be seeing 6-core 32nm processors or Clarkdale+IGP, etc.. I find the IGP part interesting as it might eventually lead to a new standard for 2D/low-3D hybrid graphics, mainly for power-saving features while the add-on GPU cards sit idle. The next "speed boost" for me would be at least 5GHz on air, using 12 threads while consuming less than 150W or so for the CPU. Right now, when most of us overclock our i7's to 4GHz, our CPU's eat around 200W under load, which is well over the 110-135W TDP. Add in 4GB sticks of 2500MHz 7-7-7 DDR3 that will eventually become cheap in 18 months or so. Everything's gonna be focused on SSD's anyways, like the shift from CRT's to expensive LCD's, from single AGP video card to expensive SLI, etc..