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Comment by whalesalad | Hacker News Reader

I just got a 13900K on Monday. Naturally something bigger and badder is right around the corner. I cry evrytim.

Haha yes that’s me every time I upgrade, every new thing you buy is bound to be outshined by the next iteration. The best cpu you can buy is always the next gen going to come soon I guess.

That's why I always buy old shit for a fraction of the price. Always a step behind but it's a constant step.

It’s a great time to buy a CPU.

Lots of competition and lots of innovation.

No. A great time to buy a CPU was a few decades ago, when each new CPU made your computer go 10x faster. Moore's Law was a fun ride.

My desktop’s got the clocks, it rocks! But it was obsolete before I opened the box.

Your laptop’s a month old? That’s great… for a nice, heavy paperweight!

It’s all about the Pentiums, baby.

Moores law is still going.

And I find multi core CPUs just as cool as the olden days.

It's not though... it has been dead for over a decade. It was about price for silicon density. Prices have gone up significantly for the newer nodes without the density increase necessary to offset.

$250 today buys you a Intel 13600, a 14 core chip.

$250 ten years ago bought you a Intel 4670K, a 4 core chip (with significantly slower cores, less cache, etc). A 14 core processor was available only as a server CPU and cost $3000.

I'm not sure that is evidence of price going up faster than density over the last 10 years.

I'll clarify Tostino's comment. For most of Moore's Law, price per mm of silicon was constant. A state-of-the-art 10 micron, 5 micron, 2 micron, 1 micron, and 500nm node, at introduction, was basically the same price per square millimetre.

This meant you had exponentially-growing numbers of transistors for the same price.

Density is going up now, but so is price. A billion transistors a 4nm will cost less than a billion at 40nm, but it's a different ride since you don't ave a 100x reduction in cost. There is a reduction, but it's not the same wild ride.

At the same time, NREs are exploding.

>. A great time to buy a CPU was a few decades ago, when each new CPU made your computer go 10x faster. Moore's Law was a fun ride.

Which makes it the worst possible time to buy a CPU as the value is low (economies of scale, market saturation) and declines fast (new models).

If you look at this another way, each new CPU made your computer 10x slower, relatively speaking.

Or terrible time, because whatever you're getting might become obsolete in just a few years

that chip has been out for about 6 months and intel release a new generation every 9 months or so

it's not exactly unexpected

Do you actually need the extra performance?

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