The motherload of computer game-changers set to come on line

Opinion: Bruce Kerr talks eighth generation desktop CPUs.

POWERFUL TECHNOLOGY: The Central Processing Unit (CPU) is the brain of your computer. Picture: Creative-Touch

IF YOU could label any part of a computer as being the brain then it would be the Central Processing Unit (CPU) that you would be talking about.

The CPU is basically an electronic chip that is plugged into your computer which can perform millions of calculations every second.

To a large degree the apparent 'speed' of your computer is very dependent on the power of this CPU.

Around two months ago, worldwide computer chip manufacturer Intel released to market, what it is calling its 8th generation desktop CPUs.

I haven't bothered writing about it until now as they also require a new generation of motherboard to plug into and only high-end motherboards for gamers had been released to market.

This situation is changing over the next week or two with standard motherboards for mainstream computing coming onto the market.

In another two weeks, you will be able to purchase a standard desktop PC with an Intel 8th Gen CPU.

However, the standard motherboards for these Gen 8 CPUs are still dearer than the existing standard motherboards for Gen 7 CPUs. So, what does this all mean?

The new CPUs offer more power per dollar to consumers however the dearer motherboard soaks up a lot of this performance gain, when you look at overall system performance per dollar.

We will be changing our custom desktop PCs over to the new CPUs however consumers will not see a big jump in performance per dollar spent - yet.

I say 'yet' as the new motherboard prices will fall quickly as their production ramps up.

The new CPUs are still good for the industry as they do offer speed increases of between 20-60% over their previous counterparts.

This performance increase is greater than we normally see and has largely come about because rival chipmaker AMD released their Ryzen CPUs recently which offered surprising performance gains.

To maintain market share Intel needed to respond so the new Intel i3, i5 and i7 CPUs will all be more powerful - plus they have released an i9 CPU as their figurehead model.

Intel has also released a 'X' (extreme) variant of the i5, i7 & i9 which require a more premium motherboard and offer more power again.

If you have the budget then more powerful computing than ever before can literally be at your fingertips!

Will this next generation of CPUs take over the world? No, it must be remembered that while CPUs are getting more powerful and faster every year they are not gaining any intelligence as such.

The intelligence in any computer system is the actual programming or software that it runs. A more powerful CPU is simply running this software quicker.

Also keep in mind that regardless of having a more powerful CPU, if your PC is not optimised for speed and if it is full of malware and junk software then even if it has the world's most powerful Intel i9 X series CPU, it can still run so slow that it is barely useable.

Originally published as The motherload of computer game-changers set to come on line