New Intel Processors, more of the same (kind of).

Now that some of the reviews have hit on the Core Ultra Series 2 processors it's interesting to see how a lot of the reviews are panning them.

Personally I like the fact that they are getting the power draw down on these things, for the past couple of years it's just seemed like both AMD and Intel just kept pushing the power limits higher and higher to clock more performance. At some point it has to stop - personally I'm not wanting a computer that's pulling 1500w on the CPU by itself. 

The thing that gets me though is that there's nothing that's come out since I built my last machine that was a "must have" upgrade and that was a Ryzen 3700x when I put it together. I did wind up tossing a 5800x in when the price tanked on those at one point but it was more a convenience thing since it freed up the 3700x to go into another machine. Even my recent purchase of the Macbook Pro wasn't driven by a need to get something faster - that was a need for something portable. 

And while the ARM based Apple Silicone and Qualcomm chips are pretty dammed cool it's going to take time to find out if they will disrupt things enough to really make a difference in how things are going. Apple's transition is pretty darn smooth, but the Windows side of things is a different situation entirely. 

I would really love to see more disruptive stuff in the CPU space but these days it's not about the hardware, it's about what you can do with the software that's going to govern who's stuff is successful in the market. 

Back in the day spreadsheet applications where the killer apps, these days, there's so many out there and technology is so integrated into our lives that there is no single killer app kicking around. So there's a potential that we could start seeing specific types of computers used for different tasks. High efficiency lower powered devices for using for day to day office type work, higher powered x86 systems to run games on, or something else for other specific scientific workflows? 

Either way I hope there's something new on the horizon. Faster is cool, but it would be nice if there was something compelling to upgrade to that wasn't some "faster" version of something that we already have.