The computer industry is quite odd, we are inundated with new products on almost a daily basis. When you truly think about it are these new releases actually new are or they just a rebrand, refresh or speed bump. A perfect example would be SATA 6G SSDs, read and write capacities have been capped due to the limitations of the 6G bandwidth for almost two years yet we still see manufacturers launching new models. Some may say that they should be considered new since a new or different memory controller is added. I would have to disagree, 550MB/s is 550MB/s whether it's on memory controller A or B, without having to get into IOPS and MTBF which are pretty close now anyway.

We also have the argument of refresh or rebrand when we talk video cards, what I would consider a rebrand you may consider a refresh when we should actually consider it a speed bump. By simply increasing the frequency and decreasing power consumption by 5 or 10 watts is simply rebranding (speed bump) since this is what should be expected as a wafer matures.

Last but not least are CPUs this is where the word speed bump was first used. We have seen CPU manufacturers increase frequencies on already established working wafers for years. Granted there have been some minor micro code, thermal interface material and wattage decreases but overall the same chipsets are being used and in the end it's just a speed bump. Intel likes to call their speed bumps tics opposed to their tocs which are complete architectural and chipset changes. Intel's latest tic is the Broadwell desktop processor and we just can't call it a speed bump. The Broadwell processor still takes advantage of the Series 9 chipset and in theory uses the same micro architecture as predecessor Haswell but this time there are actual differences.