Intel’s next-generation chips will sacrifice speed to reduce power @ Extreme Tech

The title says it all and honestly I'm surprised that it took Intel so long to decide they no longer need to build the fastest and most awesome processors on the market.

I Dub thee "The Curse of the Console"

Over the past few generations Intel has concentrated on making fast processors that were also power efficient, NVIDIA has done with same with their Maxwell GPU line and this really makes sense.  At the same time Intel has been developing a line of Atom processors designed for mobile products, they are slow but work well if you need basic computing and good battery life. 

Given that we have reached a peak in desktop performance with very little to be gained from a processor upgrade it makes sense to concentrate on making them more efficient.  eg; what AMD has been doing.

It’s strange to hear Intel, which spent decades boosting computer performance, talk instead about how it will integrate new technologies to build lower-power circuits, but it’s hard to fault the firm’s reasoning. Fifteen years ago, the computer industry was focused on giving users more performance to perform more advanced tasks. Today, discussions of doing more focus on battery life, interconnected devices, the Internet of Things, and the cloud. The old paradigm was a computer that could render, retrieve, or calculate data more quickly — the new paradigm is a system that accurately retrieves your calendar, communicates with your workout sensors, or handles your scheduling.

There is a dark side to this announcement. 

Hardware vendors have already been struggling to sell motherboards and with very low margins they have turned to adding more features to their products in hopes of creating that perfect combo that leads to more sales.  Well, the one thing that sells better than anything else is more performance and if you remove that there is really very little reason to upgrade, at least in the desktop space. 

Mobile will love it.

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