Part of the issue with Intel's PC CPU market for me is that they seem to be doing the minimal increments possible to their processors each new release.
I have an i7 860, and am thinking of upgrading now. I need a highly overclockable chip, so Ivy doesn't seem quite as good as Sandy, which is disappointing given how old Sandy Bridge now is. I'm going to hold off until Haswell is launched, but will be keeping a close eye on just how much better it is than Ivy Bridge. I'm prepared to pay a premium for a new, high end chip, but for me to part with that premium, it has to perform somewhat better than the current trend would indicate!

I'm willing AMD on to get back into the CPU race. Gone are the good old days of AMD really pushing Intel for their desktop CPU sales - and that's a shame. We saw some amazing leaps and bounds in processor performance during those years.

Roobubba
Part of the issue with Intel's PC CPU market for me is that they seem to be doing the minimal increments possible to their processors each new release.
I have an i7 860, and am thinking of upgrading now. I need a highly overclockable chip, so Ivy doesn't seem quite as good as Sandy, which is disappointing given how old Sandy Bridge now is. I'm going to hold off until Haswell is launched, but will be keeping a close eye on just how much better it is than Ivy Bridge. I'm prepared to pay a premium for a new, high end chip, but for me to part with that premium, it has to perform somewhat better than the current trend would indicate!

CPU power is already way ahead of most consumer software, even console ports from a PS4/NextBox probably aren't going to trouble a modern i5/i7 that much, the bottlenecks are in the graphics and multithreading (or lack of it). Many of the intense workloads that previously justified high-end CPUs are swinging more and more towards parallelism and GPU acceleration or using dedicated logic such as Quicksync and the AES crypto acceleration present on some Core chips.

The focus at Intel has changed from outright speed to efficiency and power consumption, the market wants portability, low power, energy saving (imagine the savings on the leccy bill to a company with thousands of PCs). Overclocking speed freak enthusiasts just aren't that important in the bigger picture.

OTOH, the low (elec) power, high (compute) power chips coming out are exactly what both the companies (saves on elec) and overclockers (have much higher margins) have asked for.

That being said I'm still on an old i7 920 Nehalem C0, and it's ticking along nicely @ 3.9GHz, with everything turned on with 1.28v. I don't see me changing chips until the die shrink on Haswell next year at the earliest. Probably wait until the architecture after that tbh as that'll probably be getting towards the end of Silicon based chips.

Roobubba
I'm willing AMD on to get back into the CPU race. Gone are the good old days of AMD really pushing Intel for their desktop CPU sales - and that's a shame. We saw some amazing leaps and bounds in processor performance during those years.

Me too - and to this point I've been very loyal to AMD. That is, the last Intel Inside desktop I bought was an i486! (did buy a core2duo laptop though). I just wish that they (AMD) didn't seem to be lagging behind so badly - although the APU stuff AMD do does seem to be pretty much “up with the hunt”.

zaph0d
OTOH, the low (elec) power, high (compute) power chips coming out are exactly what both the companies (saves on elec) and overclockers (have much higher margins) have asked for.

What I'm looking for IS the low power consumption. And there was that comment elsewhere that low-power = low-heat = low noise cooling possible. So that's a double benefit - low power and noise.

Figure Haswell might be worth looking at to give me an octo-thread processor with a sub 100W TDP. Oh, and better single thread performance than my PhenomII. ;)

As a processor n00b - all that low level detail goes right over my head - what bugs me about Intel is their seeming continual promote-and-discard strategy wrt sockets. E.g. from my woeful knowledge I know that there's sockets 1155, 1156 and 2011 at the moment and wasn't Haswell supposed to replace those with yet another new design. Totally screws up anyone who wants to buy a top spec board with the intention of getting “next years” design for it when it's available.

crossy
As a processor n00b - all that low level detail goes right over my head - what bugs me about Intel is their seeming continual promote-and-discard strategy wrt sockets. E.g. from my woeful knowledge I know that there's sockets 1155, 1156 and 2011 at the moment and wasn't Haswell supposed to replace those with yet another new design. Totally screws up anyone who wants to buy a top spec board with the intention of getting “next years” design for it when it's available.

Yeah, and don't forget the my Socket 1366, It lasted a whole single gen ^^; And the 2011 chips are 1 gen late.