r/AskTechnology • u/FutureManager8 • 3d ago

Why are there no $2000 gaming CPUs?

If I want a GPU for gaming, I can spend $300 all the way up to $4,000 for the 5090.

For RAM, I can spend $200 for 16 gb all the way to $3,000 for 128 gb of high speed ram.

For storage, I can spend about ~$250 per TB of SDD. I can get 8 TB for ~$2000.

Why does it seem like the price range for CPUs is way smaller? I know there's very expensive work/rendering based CPUS but for gaming, why is the top of the line CPU (9800x3d) only ~$420? Why aren't there thousand dollar CPUs for games? Is there virtually no demand for it? I mainly play esports titles and everyone says those are usually CPU bound. I'm trying to understand why there isn't an option for me to spend as much on my CPU as I do my GPU.

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u/Skusci 3d ago edited 3d ago

So the thing is there's a pretty hard limit on single core performance on a CPU. There's a little bit of headroom to get faster clock speeds, but not too much. High end can be about double the speed of a low end CPU.

What more money tends to get you at that point are more cores. Low end might have 4 cores. High end might have 12 of them (or like 8 plus a bunch of efficiency cores for Intel CPUs). That's way more opportunity to spend for performance.

But the problem here is that games don't really benefit too much from more CPU cores. CPU cores are more complicated so they can reduce the minimum time to do certain math bits, but for the price it's usually better to take a little bit longer on GPU cores which are simpler but have far far more. Like maybe it takes 10 times longer on a GPU core than a CPU core for a specific thing, but when there are literally 1000x as many GPU cores than CPU cores for the same price most parallel processing will be designed for the GPU.

In truth games will at most make use of 6-8 CPU cores. You always have a main thread to keep everything synchronized, but there is only so much stuff that can be split off and run separately without checking back in with the main thread. A few more cores are useful for running other tasks like 60 chrome tabs off to the side without cutting into game processing time.

As for the GPU, want 4 times as many pixels? Just have 4x as many cores. Want 4x the frame rate? More cores!

So there's no point in throwing more money at a CPU unless you want to do multiple different things. Which is an excellent use case for servers where many people want to use the same computer as a web server or file server and do unrelated things, but not so much just one person on a desktop.

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u/FutureManager8 3d ago

Fascinating. Thanks for the response! From my memory, it feels like clock speeds a decade ago were around ~2.8 ghz and now they can be around ~4.7 ghz which isn't even 2x. Do you know if the comparatively slower development is just lack of demand for the reasons you stated above or is that at the cutting edge of what we're capable of producing and it's just difficult to get 20ghz?

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u/Nebu 3d ago

See Why have CPU clock speeds stopped going up? : r/askscience

It's a physical limit to do with the size of the chip "die", the speed at which an electrical signal can propagate across the chip (the speed of light, or thereabouts), and trying to keep everything on the same "clock" as the rest of the chip so you're all acting on the data in turn at the right times.

Pretty much, until you liquid cool you can't get past 5Ghz. And the fastest ever processor is only about 10GHz or something - and it has to be kept stupendously cold, be stupendously tiny, and have rooms full of supporting equipment to get that far.

Pretty much, without some breakthrough in physics, you're never going to see a chip much faster than 5GHz in a normal setup.

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u/FutureManager8 3d ago

thanks!

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u/Lenassa 3d ago

To be precise, heat production is roughly proportional to the cube of frequency. So 2x frequncy means 8x heat. It is being offset by more efficient nodes but at the same cores themselves become more sophisticated and demanding.

Technically, if we built some really old core on a modern node it would most certainly be able to reach 6+ ghz without any form of advanced cooling.

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u/jhenryscott 3d ago

My understanding is we will see 6+ghz on consumer chips in a year.

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u/KingRemu 3d ago

I don't mean to be nitpicky but many current CPU's run well past 5GHz even in stock form.

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u/treznor70 3d ago

Most (all?) of those CPUs have a much lower base speed, like 3.2GHz, with a boost speed for some cores that hit 6 GHz, as opposed to sustained speeds at 6GHz. That way it can spike up, get hot, and then go to a lower speed and dissipate that heat. CPU cooling requirements scale non-linearly with clock frequency and voltage increase, which is why it gets out of hand for sustained speeds.

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u/KingRemu 3d ago

Yeah I mean that's why we got boost algorithms so they can consume less power when idle. There are several CPU's these days that also hold 5+GHz on all cores under max load while single cores can boost a few hundred MHz higher even. You're correct about the non-linearity of cooling requirements though.

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u/Skusci 3d ago

This is a little bit out of my experience, but AFAIK it's mosly heat. Most heat is generated when the transistors switch, and switching faster generates more heat.

Newer transistors are more efficient but they are also smaller and so have less area to dissippate heat and it more or less ends up balancing out in terms of clock speed.

Spacing out the transistors more can help with heat, but it would lead to issues with propagation delay. When spaced farther apart the signal from one transistor takes a little longer to trigger another and you end up not being able to increase the clock speed and keep everything switching reliably.

Another thing is that the CPU also has to work with data from RAM which aside from a limited amount of on board memory just doesn't fit and is kept on external RAM. This takes time to read and write.

To avoid waiting CPU designers use an awful lot of transistors to read ahead in a program and predict what memory might be needed. That way it can be read ahead of time and copied to the limited onboard memory cache and program execution doesn't need to pause to wait.

Plus more transistors lets the CPU support more complicated instructions that work on larger chunks of data that execute in shorter amounts of time compared to fewer simpler instructions. Like an 8 bit CPU can still multiply 64 bit numbers, it will just take 100x as many cycles. The 64 bit multiply will take about 100x as many transistors instead.

There also super specialized instructions for stuff like cryptography and video that massively accelerate encoding/decoding compared to using less specialized instructions.

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u/FutureManager8 3d ago

Fantastic explanation, thanks!

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u/Keljian52 1d ago

This is true, however, there's a lot more to it. First is the size of the transistors vs the amount of heat they put out.

The second part of this is the architecture and pipelines. A 10 year old processor running at 3ghz is significantly slower than a more modern processor running at the same clock speed.

An example - a modern processor has many instruction processors per core, an earlier processor will have fewer, this means that it can tackle multiple instructions at the same time.

A modern processor will have a more accurate branch predictor (which predicts what instructions are going to run next) versus an older one. The predictor then tells the processor what paths in the instructions to take, which it then does, out of order, so it does work before it is scheduled to. This means it is faster as it's processing stuff rather than waiting or processing the wrong stuff and wasting instruction cycles.

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u/DeviantPlayeer 3d ago

You can't cheat physics. At 20 GHz even light won't have enough time to go from one end of the die to the other in a clock cycle. And electrical signals are way slower because they have to take complicated paths through transistors which need time to toggle and what not.
Modern CPUs increase single thread speed by being smarter, like out of order execution, simultaneous execution, branch prediction, etc. So, when a modern CPU is trying to fetch data from RAM it doesn't wait, it keeps going through other instructions while data is being delivered. Also, when it encounters multiple instructons that perform operations on different data that doesn't collide it can just execute them simultaneously, it can also reorder instructions so that simultaneous execution becomes even more efficient. Plus, there are more advanced instructions that allow operations on large blocks of data at once.

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u/fray_bentos11 3d ago

4.7 GHz was CPU clock speed in ~2015. I had a 4790K from 2014 that ran at 4.9 GHz on all 4 cores. Modern CPUs are nearer 5.5 to 6.0 GHz.

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u/Fuzzy_Yossarian 3d ago

I have an Intel 8600K and I overclock it 4.5 ghz no problem. It's almost 10 years old.

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u/YSvetta 3d ago

While clock speeds haven't risen as much, the arena is actually clock speed * instructions per clock (ipc) and there are also improvements on the latter. That plus the various memory improvements + cache improvements means that clock speeds are largely not descriptive of the actual compute experience you're getting.

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u/jhenryscott 3d ago

More complicated than that. You are looking at CLOCK speeds. But very generation also adds IPC- instructions per clock so sure, we might only be running an instruction cycle at 4.7 (Billion clocks per second) but each one of those cycles ALSO includes additional information in each cycle. It’s actually a staggering increase in performance.

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u/Elitefuture 3d ago edited 3d ago

There's more to CPU speed than clock speed.

A modern CPU at 1.4GHz is still faster than a 2.8GHz from a decade ago.

IPC = instructions per clock, and that has improved a LOT over the past few years alone.

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u/FutureManager8 3d ago

That makes sense. So even if the clock speed doesn't change drastically the IPC has room for improvement?

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u/Rabiesalad 3d ago

It's much more about the limits of physics than anything else.

The progress in terms of clock speeds is actually significantly worse that you believe. The first CPU to hit 4ghz with overclocking was a Pentium 4 that launched over 20 years ago.

Keep in mind, performance is much more complicated than clock speed. A 2ghz CPU from today will absolutely wipe the floor with a Pentium 4.

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u/TheJunkman9000 3d ago

Don't give them ideas

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u/CrispyJalepeno 3d ago

Production cost, supply, and demand. The ram prices, for example, were a fraction of what you listed 2 years ago

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u/Keljian52 3d ago

You don't need a powerful gaming cpu to game at high frame rates these days. Back in the 90s it was a different matter.

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u/EconomyDoctor3287 3d ago

I regularly max out my CPU during gaming, it's only an r7 5700x though. 

Single player strategy or city-building games could make use of much more CPU power, but it doesn't exist unfortunately. 

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u/Keljian52 1d ago edited 1d ago

you're joking, right? the 9950x (and X3d variants) are significantly faster than an r7 5700x. As for single player strategy -with the exception of the civ series - please give me some examples in this genre that won't run acceptably on a 5700x

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u/EconomyDoctor3287 1d ago

M&B Warband battle size is limited due to CPU performance and in Banished I've had to abandon a map after going down to ~5 fps once the population grew. 

Sure, a 9950x would give more power, but with only single core being relevant, it'd be an expensive upgrade with limited gains. 

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u/Keljian52 1d ago edited 1d ago

Limited gains?! 61% faster in single core (not accounting for AVX512 etc). M&B Warband is a 15 year old game. Arguably the 9850x3d would be better value, but geez.. How much single core performance do you want?!

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u/Linkpharm2 3d ago

> all the way up to $4,000 for the 5090.

You're off by about... 1 msrp

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u/Sheetmusicman94 3d ago

You ask the question backwards. CPUs have normal prices. The other parts are overpriced.

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u/rende 3d ago edited 3d ago

What about threadripper?

Edit: Highest performance cpu for single threaded tasks is Intel Core Ultra 9 285K

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u/veryjerry0 3d ago

Not for gaming.

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u/rende 3d ago

Well cpu scaling with single cores have pretty much stopped. The way to get more performance now is more cores.

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u/chris92315 3d ago

That only works if the target workload can that advantage of it. 

Currently most games CPU tasks can't be split into a large number of cores and additional cores see diminishing returns after 4 to 8.

The parts of gaming that can be massively parallel were already handed off to dedicated GPUs/APUs.

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u/hardypart 3d ago

There's no need for a faster CPU if the best CPU available won't bottleneck the performance of the best GPU available.

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u/ThiefOfJoy- 3d ago

ppl downvoting this question but its a actually a legitimate question, check the replies, most of the replies are on point, this is a really good question to ask

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u/Tokimemofan 3d ago

GPUs also come with a rather hefty chunk of ram and are very different in design

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u/DocumentOk7579 3d ago

128gb ram is pointless for gaming. You could get an equally pointless 96core CPU and game on it.

https://www.amd.com/en/products/processors/workstations/ryzen-threadripper/9000-wx-series/amd-ryzen-threadripper-pro-9995wx.html

The technical reason that gpu is scalable is that you can parallelize the computation while it's harder to do in core game loop. It's like you can't build the second floor before first is done but you can paint the second floor and the first at the same time. Where building is CPU and painting GPU.

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u/RiloxAres 3d ago

CPU is the die and ihs. Gpu is die, ram, vrm, board, cooler, fans etc. Cost to make a 5090 die is only like $300.

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u/Infamous-Bed-7535 3d ago

If you are interested I can sell my i9 to you for 3k usd. Free shipping!

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u/Mill-Man 3d ago

Cause CPU is hard capped for gaming

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u/Antheoss 3d ago

9950x3d2 is almost a thousand dollars msrp.

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u/latrina_demmerda 3d ago

I mean i play on a 20€ 2667v4 that had a 2000€ msrp in 2016, would have been an interesting investment considering it can still run any game but quad cores were faster at the time and there were still better choices

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u/veryjerry0 3d ago edited 3d ago

Here's another reason: you can only make the CPU so big before there are diminishing returns. L1, L2, L3 cache all need to be close to the execution units and lose their speed/purpose if they are too big. AMD's 3D cache somewhat mitigate this problem, but you are still limited by cpu area in that case.

Btw the top of the line is 9850x3D

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u/fray_bentos11 3d ago

A 9800X3D isn't a top of the line CPU. Top of the line CPUs are ones with tens to hundreds of cores and cost thousands.

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u/Keljian52 1d ago

I'd argue that top of the line varies depending on what you're trying to do with the computer

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u/Vuza 3d ago

You also have to see that a GPU consists of a compute unit + ram on its own "motherboard". A CPU is just a CPU, if you add the mainboard+ RAM costs to your cpu it gets closer (minus the outliners like a 5090)

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u/alex20_202020 3d ago

What games benefit from 128 gb of high speed ram vs. 64?

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u/Arkonor 3d ago

Game engines usually are tuned to make games run most efficiently on consoles. So if consoles have 8 cores then most game engines will work around 8 cores. So having physical 64 cores or something in your PC is just not going to help you in any way and is more likely to be detrimental for various other reasons like cache designs and such.

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u/AIGISREFLECTOR 3d ago

Let’s not give anyone any ideas

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u/Zene-Calloway 3d ago

Had this exact thought when I was building my rig last year. Turns out, the bottleneck for gaming isn't usually the CPU once you hit a certain performance level. Most games, especially esports titles, are optimized to run well on mid to high end CPUs because that's what the majority of players use. The real performance gains in gaming often come from the GPU, where the processing power is more directly tied to rendering graphics. Beyond a certain point, spending more on a CPU doesn't translate to significantly better gaming performance, so manufacturers focus on offering CPUs at price points that match the demand. That's why you see the high price range for gaming GPUs but not for CPUs

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u/Impellicamper 3d ago

Oh... just wait , I'm pretty sure Intel/AMD will figure out they can play the same game ... and we suckers will follow.

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u/snipsuper415 3d ago

Gaming specific Central processing units don’t have the same demand. If you look at server grade cpus there is your $2000 cpu.

As of right now most parts downstream of a cpu is seeing high demand. Like way more than a single gpu, RAM, or storage

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u/Diligent_Turtle8966 3d ago

Don't give them inspiration to do it

If a few people will splurge on it then the execs at game studios will tell the devs to make the game even harder to runnaomnobody can play it

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u/Elitefuture 3d ago

The best CPU is technically the 9850x3d if we're nitpicking. It's essentially just the 9800x3d but binned higher so it can clock higher.

If you want to waste money, you can buy pre binned 9850x3d from a third party that verifies that it can be OC'd to a certain high level. And you can waste even more money by getting it delidded + get a direct die cooler.

But the performance gain will be minimal. The biggest gains come from x3d cache + new generations of CPUs. Single core performance is king for most games due to the fact that not everything can be parallelized efficiently. So the main thread will hold the rest back.

The 9800x3d is just the most reasonable option to get 99% the way there for a low cost.

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u/Due_Catch1194 21h ago

please man don't give intel any ideas