I can't remember the last time I used a PC whose CPU was 'too slow'. Every one I've bought in at least the last five years has been 'fast enough' for everything I want to do with it, and that includes games as well as work.
So, no need to upgrade, and no new CPU sales.
Add to that the well documented reasons not to want Windows 10, and the fact that a new PC will come with it, means I won't be upgrading voluntarily any time soon. I'll keep using my Windows 7 machines a few years longer instead.
Intel: if you want to sell more chips, kick Microsoft up the arse and tell them to take the telemetry crap out of W10. Tell me when you've done it, and I'll consider a new PC.
Hmm, i pondered if i could run win10 on one of my old PC's, googled around a bit and found out one can actually run win10 on 12 year old 256MB
machine! That suggest something for Intel perhaps!? So in hindsight upgrading to win7 and 8 appears like a robbery, if MS had made win10 lets say
just after XP then none would had to upgrade to a beefier CPU to begin with and Intel to hire all those lazy engineers to make beefier CPU's
and as such would now have not been forced to layoff all those lazy engineers .. Oh how i remember the days of fanless 486's....
http://www.techradar.com/news/software/operating-systems/you-don-t-need-a-crazy-powerful-pc-to-run-windows-10-here-s-the-proof-1288287
Hi
Somehow the idea that an OS should *force* you to upgrade a CPU has always seemed wrong. If you dig into the "why" a bit, it actually is wrong. What forced the upgrade was more the programs that would run on the OS. Simply put, it's much easier to label your software "Requires Windows 95" than to spell out it's real needs. It's been a *long* time since your word processing software or spread sheet needed more CPU. It's not clear that email ever did need much CPU ever. Outside of a few engineering tools (CAD, simulation etc) and some games, it's a rare piece of software that has even forced an upgrade to a 64 bit version of Windows.
The problem isn't that Microsoft did this or that (in this one unique case, there's a lot of other things you can rightly blame them for). It's that the software people run no longer is CPU resource bound. Desktop bloat might force people to drop a bit more RAM into an old machine. It's not likely to force them to get a whole new motherboard after 4 years.
There are *lots* of things people upgrade without needing to. If you believe that all those clothing stores at the mall are only replacing worn out stuff ... think again. Products can sell for a lot of different reasons unrelated to cold hard facts. You may *think* you are immune to that sort of thing ... even if you are, the other 99.999% of the population is not.
Ask Joe average about the CPU in his PC. Chances are he can't tell you what is in there. Right there .. a problem for Intel. Now describe two CPU's to Joe. Stop when his eyes glaze over (likely 15 seconds into the description). Which one will he go for? In almost every case, the one with the higher clock speed. The rest of the specs simply don't get Joe excited.
Remember back when clock speeds went up with each generation of CPU? Remember how you needed a bigger power supply for the new CPU? That's what stopped the party. Finding a wall plug that will supply 4KW is not easy (in most homes ... not here .. but most homes). Running the air conditioning in the winter because the PC is heating the room to much .. no fun. Adjusting the window in February means a cold draft. Power, in a number of ways, is a problem for Intel.
Intel can't sell people CPU's because they actually need a faster PC (they don't). They can't push the one and only spec that 90% of the population recognize as "better", to sell what people don't need. No matter how many times they play with I3, I5, I7 names, people just get confused rather than excited. That's because CPU's *are* confusing, and less and less exciting.
Why do I say less exciting? I have a need to set up a pretty fancy workstation to run a bunch of design and simulation software on. I've been waiting to get a "wow" moment out of Intel's latest and greatest. Instead, when I compare to the machine I built 4 years ago, I get a "is that all there is?" moment. Even with a fairly high powered "need", Sky Lake just does not get me excited. So off I go to Wikipedia ... hmm ... what gets mentioned about Sky Lake? You see a lot about low power laptops. You see mention of use in smart phones (name one) and tablets (not many). Simple answer, INTEL stopped being focused on desktop performance a while ago !!!
So who killed the desktop upgrade cycle? Everybody did. That includes Intel.
Bob