The problem with Tic Toc

Both Intel and AMD have decided separately that they would produce a new CPU architecture every 2years and that a process shrink of this architecture would take place one year after introduction in what is know as a Tic Tock strategy.

Their target is to increase or double performance with the same thermal envelop every two years or so. This is all fine and dandy if not for the fact that the TDP sealing "agreed" on by both Intel and AMD is around 135Watt.

If you look at the average mainstream CPU TDP in 2000, the max TDP was in the sub 30Watt range, compare this with today's 65Watts.

While the competition between Intel and AMD has produced magnificent increases in both performance and performance per watt, I think that both companies should aim to bring down the 135Watt TDP limit to 85-95Watts within the next 3 years, and to around 65-75 Watts within the the following two years, irrespective of what the enthusiasts want. Additionally, they should aim to bring down the TDP of the average mainstream desktop back down to it's pre 2001 levels of less than 30watts.

Of course an exception can be made in the cases of server and HPC applications that require the maximum amount of performance. IMHO, games should not qualify for this kind of thing.

One other party to blame for this mess is M$ and its OS design philosophy. M$ should make it a target for itself to have its latest OS version run on hardware that is at least 2-3 years old at the time of release. Such a move would prevent people from rushing to replace their hardware. And would allow CPU manufactures to focus on creating more elegant designs. This is very doable as most Linux distros run at close to half of the requirements of Vista.

The same goes for game developer's, they too can write their code in a way that makes better use of existing hardware. For example, support for Intel's SSE4 and AMD's SSE4a is still very limited, though these can in some cases double the performance.