Personally if I cared enough to own something like this, a PCIe card with an FPGA seems to be something that'd make a lot more sense. I'm starting to get really annoyed that intel at this point is just bored and looking for relatively niche ways to add minor amounts of performance at the cost of software developers' time. I understand the FPGA would run with much better latencies under the same die as the CPU, but I just don't see that being important enough. If you've got a process with an infinite/indefinite duration and isn't expected to give live results (such as 3D games), latency doesn't really matter that much. In a case where it really does matter, I think people would rather just pay for an extra 500MHz or another couple additional cores and ditch the FPGA.

Personally if I cared enough to own something like this, a PCIe card with an FPGA seems to be something that'd make a lot more sense. I'm starting to get really annoyed that intel at this point is just bored and looking for relatively niche ways to add minor amounts of performance at the cost of software developers' time. I understand the FPGA would run with much better latencies under the same die as the CPU, but I just don't see that being important enough. If you've got a process with an infinite/indefinite duration and isn't expected to give live results (such as 3D games), latency doesn't really matter that much. In a case where it really does matter, I think people would rather just pay for an extra 500MHz or another couple additional cores and ditch the FPGA.

I can see where you're coming from with this. I'm really hoping AMD release some killer chips in the near future which will hopefully provide us with a decent bit of competition. Intel have been stuck on 4 cores in the mainstream and 6 (soon to be 8) in the high end for far too damned long, 5 generations I think the count is.

Intel develops better hardware when it has to but at the moment in Intels eyes there is no need they don't have a competitor challenging them we need AMD to beat them with a truly new CPU then we will see true CPU development from Intel and back to healthy competition

This is a chip for datacenters and such, not to create games and play them.

AMD are supposedly working on something special for post-AMD Excavator. It will probably require Windows 9 for best performance, which shouldn't be an issue as it is expected to be released before the new CPU arrives. Rumours suggest it will be APU only, considering the FPU and some integer stuff is shared between the traditional CPU and the modified GPU parts. I'm looking forward to it, since Haswell and Haswell refresh are not worthy upgrades, Broadwell looking not much better. Skylake may be the first consideration fir an upgrade for me, but that is due around the same time as the new AMD.

Yes, I've heard about this rumor too - supposed to be another from-scratch design. It'll be a little disappointing if it really is APU only. So far AMD GPUs don't tend to serve as many non-graphics purposes as nvidia. OpenCL isn't widely used enough, AMD GPUs don't support CUDA or physx, and last time I checked AMD and nvidia drivers installed at the same time don't get along very well, so if someone wants any discrete nvidia GPUs, a large % of AMD's new chips will go completely unused. I would love to be proven wrong.