TR Forums

whm1974 · Sun Jun 04, 2017 8:05 pm

OK after hearing all about AMD and Intel's new "Threadripper" and Core i9 CPUs along with their price tags, I'm beginning to wonder what exactly is a consumer CPU? Don't get wrong, I love having high end hardware but I would have to be making money with it to consider buying what are now considered to be consumer products even if I was filthy rich. The most I'll pay for a CPU is maybe ~400ish with s/h and a nice aftermarket HSF included.

At point do we start to get really silly?

HERETIC · Sun Jun 04, 2017 8:44 pm

whm1974 wrote:
OK after hearing all about AMD and Intel's new "Threadripper" and Core i9 CPUs along with their price tags, I'm beginning to wonder what exactly is a consumer CPU? Don't get wrong, I love having high end hardware but I would have to be making money with it to consider buying what are now considered to be consumer products even if I was filthy rich. The most I'll pay for a CPU is maybe ~400ish with s/h and a nice aftermarket HSF included.

At point do we start to get really silly?

At WHAT point do we get silly?-When you consider here in OZ many pay over $1000 for a "PHONE"(That generally has a shorter lifespan)
Consumerism at it's best.......................................................

whm1974 · Sun Jun 04, 2017 8:49 pm

HERETIC wrote:
whm1974 wrote:
OK after hearing all about AMD and Intel's new "Threadripper" and Core i9 CPUs along with their price tags, I'm beginning to wonder what exactly is a consumer CPU? Don't get wrong, I love having high end hardware but I would have to be making money with it to consider buying what are now considered to be consumer products even if I was filthy rich. The most I'll pay for a CPU is maybe ~400ish with s/h and a nice aftermarket HSF included.

At point do we start to get really silly?

At WHAT point do we get silly?-When you consider here in OZ many pay over $1000 for a "PHONE"(That generally has a shorter lifespan)
Consumerism at it's best.......................................................

I had no idea that phones even went that high.

liquid_mage · Sun Jun 04, 2017 8:49 pm

Consumer grade chips are Pentiums, I3, I5, I7, AMD Jaguar, Puma, Ryzen 3/5/7. The reality is the average consumer has no idea. Even people who do some research end up with and I3 maybe an I5, and for most people these CPUs will more than meet their needs. Heck most of my family wont spend more than $500 on a laptop and I will recommend an SSD over anything else. To wrap up I'll say most consumers don't need I7 or Ryzen 7, these are for high end gaming or content creators who aren't dropping $2,400+ on hardware.

Steam shows 45.35% of users have 2 physical cores and 48% have 4 physical cores, and 55% of users have hyper-threading.

Personally $300us is my tops for a CPU, plus 30-50 for an aftermarket cooler.

whm1974 · Sun Jun 04, 2017 9:17 pm

liquid_mage wrote:
Consumer grade chips are Pentiums, I3, I5, I7, AMD Jaguar, Puma, Ryzen 3/5/7. The reality is the average consumer has no idea. Even people who do some research end up with and I3 maybe an I5, and for most people these CPUs will more than meet their needs. Heck most of my family wont spend more than $500 on a laptop and I will recommend an SSD over anything else. To wrap up I'll say most consumers don't need I7 or Ryzen 7, these are for high end gaming or content creators who aren't dropping $2,400+ on hardware.

Steam shows 45.35% of users have 2 physical cores and 48% have 4 physical cores, and 55% of users have hyper-threading.

Personally $300us is my tops for a CPU, plus 30-50 for an aftermarket cooler.

Aren't most gamers on steam playing at 1080p or less with a large chunk of them using iGPUs? The last time I looked dGPUs with around the performance level of the 750Ti were the most common.

DragonDaddyBear · Sun Jun 04, 2017 9:19 pm

I think AMD would like consumer CPUs to have more cores. I am no chip designer but it seems that they have an easier time cramming more cores that getting more out of a core in a CPU. AMD has been doing this with the FX for years. The down side is threaded programs after more difficult to develop. And, from the little exposure i had in college you usually target a number of threads. Aim for too many and you kill the performance. Aim for to little and you leave a lot on the table.

End User · Sun Jun 04, 2017 9:32 pm

A consumer product is anything I can buy.

whm1974 · Sun Jun 04, 2017 9:33 pm

Losergamer04 wrote:
I think AMD would like consumer CPUs to have more cores. I am no chip designer but it seems that they have an easier time cramming more cores that getting more out of a core in a CPU. AMD has been doing this with the FX for years. The down side is threaded programs after more difficult to develop. And, from the little exposure i had in college you usually target a number of threads. Aim for too many and you kill the performance. Aim for to little and you leave a lot on the table.

Personally I think that 8 cores/16 threads is just fine for a consumer CPU.

GeForce6200 · Sun Jun 04, 2017 9:36 pm

I've been shifting my focus from pc hardware to automotive, but I feel at least on the enthusiast end for both we buy more then we need. Granted it's not entirely the same as one requires user input more then the other but we all need faster/newer/better. All the main hardware in my sig has been purchased used and I'm still satisfied with performance. Granted I'm still at 1080. I agree with liquid_mage the cap for a consumer CPU today is around $300. IMO in the workplace I'm limited by screen size and loading times due to mechanical drives. The CPU is a gen 2 or 3 i3.

End User wrote:
A consumer product is anything I can buy.

I agree to an extent. I would say for the vast majority of products yes. But we can buy tanks, former F1 cars and other odd things never designed for consumer use.

End User · Sun Jun 04, 2017 9:40 pm

GeForce6200 wrote:
I agree with liquid_mage the cap for a consumer CPU today is around $300.

Perhaps you should define what you mean by "consumer". Someone who buys a $1,999 CPU is a consumer as far as I am concerned.

Do you mean a low-end consumer? A cheap consumer?

End User · Sun Jun 04, 2017 9:42 pm

GeForce6200 wrote:
I've been shifting my focus from pc hardware to automotive, but I feel at least on the enthusiast end for both we buy more then we need. Granted it's not entirely the same as one requires user input more then the other but we all need faster/newer/better. All the main hardware in my sig has been purchased used and I'm still satisfied with performance. Granted I'm still at 1080. I agree with liquid_mage the cap for a consumer CPU today is around $300. IMO in the workplace I'm limited by screen size and loading times due to mechanical drives. The CPU is a gen 2 or 3 i3.

End User wrote:
A consumer product is anything I can buy.

I agree to an extent. I would say for the vast majority of products yes. But we can buy tanks, former F1 cars and other odd things never designed for consumer use.

Tanks?!? I though we were talking about CPUs.

GeForce6200 · Sun Jun 04, 2017 9:46 pm

End User wrote:
GeForce6200 wrote:
I've been shifting my focus from pc hardware to automotive, but I feel at least on the enthusiast end for both we buy more then we need. Granted it's not entirely the same as one requires user input more then the other but we all need faster/newer/better. All the main hardware in my sig has been purchased used and I'm still satisfied with performance. Granted I'm still at 1080. I agree with liquid_mage the cap for a consumer CPU today is around $300. IMO in the workplace I'm limited by screen size and loading times due to mechanical drives. The CPU is a gen 2 or 3 i3.

End User wrote:
A consumer product is anything I can buy.

I agree to an extent. I would say for the vast majority of products yes. But we can buy tanks, former F1 cars and other odd things never designed for consumer use.

Tanks?!? I though we were talking about CPUs.

I guess I keep reading it as "average consumer" which is incorrect. As for the tanks reference I was meaning that yes we can buy it and legally own it, but it's design was never for "consumer purchase". Probably a poor analogy and off topic.

Sun Jun 04, 2017 9:50 pm

End User wrote:
A consumer product is anything I can buy.

That's a useless definition in the general case. You can buy your own datacenter (or a jetliner) if you have enough money. Does that make them consumer products just because there are individuals out there who could afford them?

travbrad · Sun Jun 04, 2017 9:53 pm

whm1974 wrote:
OK after hearing all about AMD and Intel's new "Threadripper" and Core i9 CPUs along with their price tags, I'm beginning to wonder what exactly is a consumer CPU? Don't get wrong, I love having high end hardware but I would have to be making money with it to consider buying what are now considered to be consumer products even if I was filthy rich. The most I'll pay for a CPU is maybe ~400ish with s/h and a nice aftermarket HSF included.

At point do we start to get really silly?

Most people, even enthusiasts, are using CPUs under $400. In fact the absolute best gaming CPU (7700K) in existence tops out at $340ish, and you can get a huge portion of that gaming performance in significantly cheaper CPUs as well. Anything more expensive than that is really aimed at specific power users who need lots of cores/threads for video encoding, photo work, etc

High-end consumer CPUs have always been very expensive and I haven't really noticed a change in that regard. 12 years ago AMD launched the Athlon 64 X2 processors, ranging from $500 to $1000. Almost 20 years ago Pentium II launched at around $700, and Intel had a bunch of those "Extreme Edition" CPUs over the years that were about $1000. If anything CPUs are actually cheaper now considering how much bang you get for your buck, how long they last, and accounting for inflation.

If we are going to complain about prices on hardware getting silly, I'd start with graphics cards not CPUs.

whm1974 · Sun Jun 04, 2017 10:04 pm

travbrad wrote:
whm1974 wrote:
OK after hearing all about AMD and Intel's new "Threadripper" and Core i9 CPUs along with their price tags, I'm beginning to wonder what exactly is a consumer CPU? Don't get wrong, I love having high end hardware but I would have to be making money with it to consider buying what are now considered to be consumer products even if I was filthy rich. The most I'll pay for a CPU is maybe ~400ish with s/h and a nice aftermarket HSF included.

At point do we start to get really silly?

Most people, even enthusiasts, are using CPUs under $400. In fact the absolute best gaming CPU (7700K) in existence tops out at $340ish, and you can get a huge portion of that gaming performance in significantly cheaper CPUs as well. Anything more expensive than that is really aimed at specific power users who need lots of cores/threads for video encoding, photo work, etc

High-end consumer CPUs have always been very expensive and I haven't really noticed a change in that regard. 12 years ago AMD launched the Athlon 64 X2 processors, ranging from $500 to $1000. Almost 20 years ago Pentium II launched at around $700, and Intel had a bunch of those "Extreme Edition" CPUs over the years that were about $1000. If anything CPUs are actually cheaper now considering how much bang you get for your buck, how long they last, and accounting for inflation.

If we are going to complain about prices on hardware getting silly, I'd start with graphics cards not CPUs.

Graphics cards are an another example where consumer products have gotten really silly. I'm mentioning highly priced CPUs because that was just in the news.

oldmanelements · Sun Jun 04, 2017 10:23 pm

Pretty simply, I'd consider anything that is not a enterprise product a consumer product...

In this case, enterprise products would need to support ECC RAM, along with redundancy for failures and possibly hot swap features....

But at a minimum the CPU / Motherboard would need to support ECC.. No ECC it's a consumer product, but normally non consumer systems would come configured with RAID drives, dual power supplys, and in the case of servers, hot swapable drives, memory and even cpus...

End User · Sun Jun 04, 2017 10:27 pm

just brew it! wrote:
End User wrote:
A consumer product is anything I can buy.

That's a useless definition in the general case. You can buy your own datacenter (or a jetliner) if you have enough money. Does that make them consumer products just because there are individuals out there who could afford them?

It's as useless as the term consumer.

bfg-9000 · Sun Jun 04, 2017 10:28 pm

travbrad wrote:
If we are going to complain about prices on hardware getting silly, I'd start with graphics cards not CPUs.

whm1974 wrote:
Graphics cards are an another example where consumer products have gotten really silly.

They look pretty stable to me, except the very highest-end 7980 extreme edition equivalents:

Props to [H]

End User · Sun Jun 04, 2017 10:33 pm

travbrad wrote:
Most people, even enthusiasts, are using CPUs under $400. In fact the absolute best gaming CPU (7700K) in existence tops out at $340ish, and you can get a huge portion of that gaming performance in significantly cheaper CPUs as well. Anything more expensive than that is really aimed at specific power users who need lots of cores/threads for video encoding, photo work, etc

So "power users" aren't consumers?

End User · Sun Jun 04, 2017 10:37 pm

HERETIC wrote:
whm1974 wrote:
OK after hearing all about AMD and Intel's new "Threadripper" and Core i9 CPUs along with their price tags, I'm beginning to wonder what exactly is a consumer CPU? Don't get wrong, I love having high end hardware but I would have to be making money with it to consider buying what are now considered to be consumer products even if I was filthy rich. The most I'll pay for a CPU is maybe ~400ish with s/h and a nice aftermarket HSF included.

At point do we start to get really silly?

At WHAT point do we get silly?-When you consider here in OZ many pay over $1000 for a "PHONE"(That generally has a shorter lifespan)
Consumerism at it's best.......................................................

I paid $1,300 CDN + tax for my phone. Worth every penny. An excellent consumer product.

whm1974 · Sun Jun 04, 2017 10:42 pm

End User wrote:
HERETIC wrote:
whm1974 wrote:
OK after hearing all about AMD and Intel's new "Threadripper" and Core i9 CPUs along with their price tags, I'm beginning to wonder what exactly is a consumer CPU? Don't get wrong, I love having high end hardware but I would have to be making money with it to consider buying what are now considered to be consumer products even if I was filthy rich. The most I'll pay for a CPU is maybe ~400ish with s/h and a nice aftermarket HSF included.

At point do we start to get really silly?

At WHAT point do we get silly?-When you consider here in OZ many pay over $1000 for a "PHONE"(That generally has a shorter lifespan)
Consumerism at it's best.......................................................

I paid $1,300 CDN + tax for my phone. Worth every penny. An excellent consumer product.

Help me, I'm having a heart attack!!!

Sun Jun 04, 2017 10:57 pm

End User wrote:
just brew it! wrote:
End User wrote:
A consumer product is anything I can buy.

That's a useless definition in the general case. You can buy your own datacenter (or a jetliner) if you have enough money. Does that make them consumer products just because there are individuals out there who could afford them?

It's as useless as the term consumer.

While I agree the term is somewhat ambiguous/vague, I don't think it is without value. I would define a "consumer product" as something one could reasonably expect to make a profit on by selling it primarily to individuals.

So:

Ryzen 3/5/7: yes
Threadripper and i9: probably not, unless you count sales to self-employed individuals who are using it in their line of work
Your phone: yes, but you (and anyone else who would pay that much for a phone) are on the fringe

The fact that I've bought an oscilloscope and FPGA development kit does not make them consumer products; they're not normally used by individuals in a home setting. The fact that someone, somewhere, purchased something to use personally (either as part of a hobby, or a home-based business) does not automatically make it a consumer product.

bfg-9000 · Sun Jun 04, 2017 11:09 pm

BTW back when CPUs used to improve a lot every year they had a very sharp drop from the initially offered price which only the earliest adopters would pay:

Those days may be back again with the recent RyZen price cuts. Perhaps someone with better google-fu could find a more recent chart? I mean End User's phone is probably close to being faster than anything on it...

And just for fun:

BIF · Sun Jun 04, 2017 11:25 pm

Another thread about to be removed from life support by pedantry. I say this with all the love in my heart: Sometimes the smartest people can also be the most annoying.

Let's all unclench for a moment and stop overthinking this. Consider the common meaning for the word.

I say real consumer CPUs are anything up to and including the i7 (or rough equivalent) level, at all price points. Maybe the highest price points would be "Prosumer", but eh, is it really so critical that we feel we must slice this penny three times edgewise?

Carry on! :wink:

DragonDaddyBear · Sun Jun 04, 2017 11:29 pm

whm1974 wrote:
Losergamer04 wrote:
I think AMD would like consumer CPUs to have more cores. I am no chip designer but it seems that they have an easier time cramming more cores that getting more out of a core in a CPU. AMD has been doing this with the FX for years. The down side is threaded programs after more difficult to develop. And, from the little exposure i had in college you usually target a number of threads. Aim for too many and you kill the performance. Aim for to little and you leave a lot on the table.

Personally I think that 8 cores/16 threads is just fine for a consumer CPU.

Sure, if they are not sitting idle. For most consumers(not us) they will .

Pancake · Mon Jun 05, 2017 12:19 am

For x86, right now there is only ONE non-consumer brand - Intel Xeon. Everything else is consumer grade.

strangerguy · Mon Jun 05, 2017 12:42 am

I dunno what the big deal with the CPU historical prices are. Adjusting for inflation, I already spent less in the 2010s than the 00s in PC hardware averaged per year, even though all of my 00s CPUs are <$200 chips (XP 1700+, A64 3500+, C2D E6300) and the rest of the components are also geared towards the low-end of the spectrum: no 10K Raptors, uber-OCing RAM, 680i SLI boards etc.

travbrad · Mon Jun 05, 2017 1:11 am

bfg-9000 wrote:
travbrad wrote:
If we are going to complain about prices on hardware getting silly, I'd start with graphics cards not CPUs.
whm1974 wrote:
Graphics cards are an another example where consumer products have gotten really silly.
They look pretty stable to me, except the very highest-end 7980 extreme edition equivalents:
Props to [H]

Thanks for the Interesting charts! I just remember my first ever high-end card was the 9700 PRO for $400 and nowadays $400 is basically the 3rd or 4th best card, but with inflation the prices at the top are pretty stable you're right. I guess the more irksome trend for me this with this recent generation is how much the tier of cards just below the top end has gone up. GTX 970 launched at $330 for example, while the 1070 effectively launched at $450. 980 launched at $550 while the 1080 launched at $700.

I guess that probably has more to do with the lack of competition than anything though. AMD hasn't had anything that can compete above the 1060 so far. Nvidia still appears to be selling tons of cards so why lower prices?

End User wrote:
travbrad wrote:
Most people, even enthusiasts, are using CPUs under $400. In fact the absolute best gaming CPU (7700K) in existence tops out at $340ish, and you can get a huge portion of that gaming performance in significantly cheaper CPUs as well. Anything more expensive than that is really aimed at specific power users who need lots of cores/threads for video encoding, photo work, etc

So "power users" aren't consumers?

Of course they are consumers. I was just saying it's a pretty small niche of people who need or would see a big benefit from those CPUs over $400. The only consumer CPUs over $400 right now are Broadwell-Es and the Ryzen 7 1800X, and you can basically get the 1800X performance for $100 less with a bit of overclocking too.

whm1974 · Mon Jun 05, 2017 1:13 am

The only things I have that are really high end in my system are the two 1TB SSDs and my 30" Dell 3014 display. I had I fully expect this rig to last me until 2023 and still be useful enough to keep around as a second computer.

NTMBK · Mon Jun 05, 2017 3:03 am

The i9 and Threadripper are both workstation CPUs with the badge filed off and a few features disabled. They aren't aimed at 99.9% of the consumer market.

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