The Price/Power/Performance Trinity: Processing Units

The Price/Power/Performance Trinity: Processing Units

When it comes to computer processors there are three specific important parts to it's impact. The price of the processor, the amount of power it uses, and it's performance. Usually these three things are at odds with each other. You can have a processor that performs well but it's going to cost a lot and it'll use a lot of power. You might get a processor that's low powered, but performance will suffer or the price will be sky high. However some companies have shown it doesn't always have to be this way.

Let's start with the Nvidia 600 series of cards.  Nvidia kicked things off in March of 2012 with the GTX 680. Hitting a price point of $500 it came onto the scene to great reviews. Featuring Nvidia's new Kepler architecture, it showed a different direction for Nvidia, a company not previously known for it's price to performance ratio, nor it's low power offerings. It replaced the previous flagship single processor card, the GTX 580 and managed to not only show significant gains in performance, but also remaining at the same price point and managed to use less power. It was unfortunate that the significance of this was lost on the tech world who cried foul, simply because Nvidia identified the core as the GK104 a designation usually reserved for their midranged cards and not their flagship. Not only had Nvidia managed to better themselves, beating their previous high performance card by about 25%, but also managed to beat AMD's HD 7970 by about 5%, came in at $50 cheaper, used less power, and also was cooler and quieter to boot.

It was a significant accomplishment, usually you would have to wait for the mid range offering for something like this. Previous flagships, especially from Nvidia, performed well, however they used a ton of power, produced a lot of heat (even enough to cook an egg), and were usually very loud. Enthusiasts usually made excuses that these things were worth it for the performance, but personally I never saw the draw. I have always bought midranged cards, be it Nvidia's GTX 560 Ti or AMD's HD 5850, because I prefer to have a balance of all those elements. The GTX 600 series marked the first time that all these were in check. Nvidia has only improved on this hitting with the GTX 670 which came in performing almost as well (within 5%) as the GTX 680 for $100 less, using even less power. Most recently they came in with the GTX 650 Ti BOOST, a card that at a price of $170 performs as well as the previous midrange flagshig the GTX 570 a card that cost more than twice as much about a year ago. Nvidia has shown that making a product that uses a limited amount of power, performs brilliantly, and doesn't cost an arm and a leg, is very possible.

The next big player is Intel. Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture showed a significant improvement in performance and power savings. It was a huge step up from the previous generation and not a single chip came in with over a 95w TDP. Then Intel hit with their second generation called Ivy Bridge. Ivy bridge all clocked in at 77w. A significant drop in power all while advancing performance and while keeping prices down. It made AMD's offerings seem even more disappointing. Their flagship processor, the 3770K performed roughly 5-10% better than the previous 2700K with a lower TDP and even cost slightly less. They even managed to pop in a quad-core high performance chip at 69w with the i5-3350P by disabling the integrated GPU, that still was under $200.

My point with all this is that it should not longer be acceptable for companies to release processors for any use that sacrifice any of the three for another. We should as consumers demand this. Nvidia and Intel have paved the way for a world where flagships are not hot enough to cook on and don't use enough power to shut down the national grid. It is a bit ironic that both Intel and Nvidia would have been on the opposite end of this post just a few years ago. Also interesting to note is the mobile world is truly heating up especially with the explosion of tablets within the last year or two, even more so with Windows 8 tablets. It's going to be an exciting next few years for anyone interested in tech. Long live tech!