Intel Targets AMD With Affordable Unlocked CPUs

EconolineCrush writes "For years, AMD has catered to gamers and enthusiasts with mid-range Black Edition processors whose unlocked multipliers make overclocking easy. Intel has traditionally reserved unlocked multipliers for its ultra-expensive Extreme CPUs, but it has now brought the feature to affordable models that compete directly with AMD's most popular processors. The Core i5-655K and Core i7-875K have two and four cores, respectively, and they're priced at just $216 and $342. It appears that both will easily hit speeds in excess of 4GHz with air cooling. Surprisingly, even at stock speeds, the i7-875K offers better performance and power efficiency per dollar than just about any other desktop CPU out there."

Comments

That's "frequency", not speed

[Anonymous Coward]

Really, you call yourself a news for nerds site.

Re:That's "frequency", not speed

[Anonymous Coward]

What do you expect? It's a kdawson submission. You know: the submissions that always plain incorrect or just total garbage

Re:That's "frequency", not speed

[poetmatt]

for once, quite accurate by the anon. Reviews about these have been inconsistent, some citing bad overclocking potential and generally being not for enthusiasts.

Meanwhile, others seem to state it's a full sweep and/or basically great .

I'm wondering if this is another scenario of handpicked engineering samples or not.

I'm not at all convinced that this is great, or horrible. Anyone care to weigh in with better comments than kdawson?

Re:That's "frequency", not speed

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

In any overclocking scenario results aren't assured(though, at certain historical moments, they very nearly have been for certain chips). It isn't a huge surprise that there is some variability being seen; but the small sample size(maybe a dozen review sites, with a chip or two each) doesn't let us say too much).

The only thing that would be really sleazy would be if the review processors "just happened" to perform atypically well compared to the ones that poor saps can actually buy. Since, though, the mixed reviews are coming from reviewers, that seems less likely, and that these chips are simply spotty overclockers more likely(unless, of course, some of the reviewers are reviewing "representative samples" kindly provided by Intel, and others are reviewing representative samples scored from somewhere in the distribution chain.

The fact that a chip only sometimes outperforms its sticker speed is irksome for the overclocker; but not a big deal. If Intel is feeding handpicks to the reviewers, that sucks.

Re:That's "frequency", not speed

[poetmatt]

Well, thats why I want to know. It's not at all unknown for them to handpick the samples. I remember some recent controversy about this with somebody, I forgot if it was Nvidia, AMD, or Intel, or all of them in general.

The sites with the great results seem to say "this kick ass", and the ones without are meh, so it doesn't seem to be indicative of whether this processor is even worth it or not, all things taken into consideration.

Re:That's "frequency", not speed

[Runaway1956]

Even with highly overclockable AMD's, you have to search for the production code, then determine which week it was produced. There may be one single week, or a run of two to four weeks, but you have to narrow it down to one of those good periods. One week, you get a near lemon that won't overclock 5% - the following week, you get an "OH MY GOD THAT'S FUCKING FAST! CHECK THE TEMPERATURE!" chip. Even among the known good overclockers, stability becomes an issue. Week 32 will run super fast, but will only stay up and stable for a week or so at a time, while week 47 will run the same speed forever.

Now, I'm pulling numbers out of my ass, but you get the idea here. If you're serious about overclocking, you have to hit the forums, and find out what other people are doing. Then, when you've identified a chip that does what you want, you start searching for it. But, be prepared to pay a premium.

Personally, I shop for a fairly good overclocker - I have two Opterons that are known to run at ~3GHZ and be stable. But, they are rated at 2 Ghz and 2.2 Ghz. I bumped them up a conservative 5% using the soft-menu or EZ-menu or whatever in the motherboard BIOS. Why, you ask? Well, I figure that I've got a good, super quality chip known to run for years under extreme abuse. They should last ME damned near forever!!

Well - maybe not that long, but at least until the next ice age. ;^)

4 GHz, eh?

[Pojut]

I thought we learned that, like sex and the Pentium 4, faster isn't always necessarily better...

Re:4 GHz, eh?

[Anonymous Coward]

I thought we learned that, like sex and the Pentium 4, faster isn't always necessarily better...

Well, that depends... have you seen some of the women around here?

Re:4 GHz, eh?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

When making a direct comparison between chip X running at frequency Y and chip X running at frequency Z, speed does correlate pretty closely to frequency(unless you are being bottlenecked hard by some other aspect of the system). Assuming you don't care about puny things like "deafening fan noise" and "having to throw a baby seal into the boiler every 15 minutes just to keep the lights from flickering"(and, if you are a true overclocker, you care nothing for such trifles) faster is better.

Re:4 GHz, eh?

[ch-chuck]

sex and the Pentium 4

Is that the new TV show for geeks?

Re:4 GHz, eh?

[TheKidWho]

Yes, faster is always better.

What we learned is that high GHZ don't necessarily imply a chip is faster.

Yawn

[MBGMorden]

"just $216 and $342"?

The majority of regular users can get by with just about any modern processor on the market today. Just glancing at Newegg, single core CPU's are starting at $32. Dual cores at $50. Quad cores at $81. I personally haven't spent more than $100 on a processor in ages, and I'm more or less a power user (do heavy programming and video encoding as well as other such tasks on my systems).

Now, at work, for servers, and I'm sure other users who are doing things like heavy graphics editing and such, people do need faster processors, but the people doing such tasks are NOT going to give two shits whether or not the multiplier is unlocked (anybody using an overclocked processor in a professional environment is just asking for trouble).

So you're left with the absolute hardcore hardware enthusiast market. Even in this market though you're going to have the "I'm poor and don't want to spend much" people who are still going for the low cost ones and trying to push them, and the "I've got money to blow and want the fastest available" people who were likely buying the really, really expensive stuff already.

In short, I just don't see this feature, at the stated price points, as really having much of a market.

Re:Yawn

[thijsh]

Yeah, but the $32 CPU has an e-peen value of zero, while these babies raise your e-peen over 9000!!! It's 'the most e-peen for your buck' (I think that was in the small letters at the bottom of the Intel advertisement).

Re:Yawn

[drinkypoo]

In short, I just don't see this feature, at the stated price points, as really having much of a market.

Corvettes and Camaros sell Citations and Celebrities.

Or in other words, Intel will sell more CPUs than AMD if they can convince the world that they have a bigger penis. Nobody wants their CPU to come from small penis guy, or to imply that they are one.

It is rather crazy that gamers buy these, though. Far be it from me to tell anyone how to spend their money; whatever makes you happy that doesn't hurt anybody (indictments of the western lifestyle aside for now) is fine with me. But if you stay just behind the curve you can upgrade every year (to last year's kit) and still be able to play virtually every game at quite good settings. Buying the latest and greatest comes with a massive price:performance penalty. Once you get into the new generation of lower-power equipment it seems like there's little motivation to ride the upgrade train so far or long.

Re:Yawn

[Nadaka]

Exactly. You can get an unlocked quad core 3.2Ghz AMD 955 for $160 on newegg, that is more than enough performance for anything a "gamer" is going to be doing. The only reason to even want more than that is if you are chasing ego with benchmarks/folding@home or are doing bulk HD video encoding/graphics rendering.

Re:Yawn

[Lord Ender]

If you do computationally-intensive workstation tasks, like video editing, gaming, virtualization, or using java (sigh); you really will appreciate going from a $100 CPU to a $300 CPU. Using faster components also means having an overall less-frustrating experience with your computer.

At home, I have an i7, an SSD, a high-end NVIDIA GPU, and the fastest RAM my mobo can take. At work I have a computer made of the budget components you think are good enough. The difference is extremely evident. My computing tasks happen as fast as I can think at home. At work, I often have to wait for things to load, which can derail my train-of-though, lower my productivity, or just generally piss me off.

A few hundred more for good components is money very-well spent.

Re:Yawn

[rrhal]

Whats even crazier is that some of these chips will end up in the desktops of the pointy-haired and their chosen minions because they feel that "Big Penis" CPUs will reflect better business practice. Intel sells a huge number of chips at a premium price to corporations when cheaper AMD CPUs would do the same job.

Re:Yawn

[Fross]

There is a guy who posts this exact message, almost word for word, every time a new CPU or graphics card is announced. "This is useless - I'm a power user and I can get by with a can of tuna and a bit of string".

Well, I'm afraid I have to tell you, you're not a power user, if you don't need the power that is now available. 2005's power user, maybe. But if you want to do video editing (and I mean final cut/premiere, not reencoding your dvd rips), play the latest games etc, then you do need that hardware. That software is designed to run on that hardware. And if you manage your own machine, whether it's for gaming of photoshop or whatever, you're going to care that this thing gives you bang for your buck. for what it's worth, this new chip isn't the fastest available. It isn't even close. It's the best value high-end chip, with a view to become even better value if you're open to overclocking it.

If you're not in that target audience, then fine - why do you complain about it? Do you bitch that lamborghinis are too expensive? "$150,000? I have a ford cortina that I got for $500 and it gets me to the mall just fine!". You don't see there is a market for this, because you are looking at a sample size of 1. Intel and AMD have a multi-billion business riding on this, I for one trust they're going to have done their homework.

(And I'm interested in the chip too - I'm planning a system upgrade soon - first since my Q6600 - and I like high-end, value chips I can overclock!)

Re:Yawn

[Pharmboy]

I concur. I just set my watch back one year and save thousands of dollars on everything. New games $50? Nope, mine are $25. New processor $300? Nope, mine are $100 and runs my one year old games perfectly. My last "new" car was $30k new but I bought it with 8k miles and just under 1 year old for $20k with full warranty. I'm about to buy a pair of Motorola Droids, which I can get for $99-$199 for both (2y contract, yes). It doesn't always pay off, but on average it saves up tremendously without sacrificing anything but a little time.

The net results is that I actually can buy MORE toys for the same money. Delayed gratification can be a beautiful thing.

Re:Yawn

[amazeofdeath]

Having been part of PC building community for a long time with a lot of experience in everything from low-end as-cheap-as-possible builds to ridiculously expensive gaming builds, your comment is not based on reality. Unless you have a very short memory, about 4 years ago you had to spend at least $200 to get any dual core CPU (Pentium D or AMD Athlon X2), so I very much doubt your "ages" comment on a CPU suitable for your uses. And especially vid encoding benefits a lot from quad core CPUs with suitable architectures, so were you seriously informed about these things, you would have put the limit to that $200, so that Intel's i5-750 (good at gaming, excellent bang for the buck in other desktop task, like video encoding) would have fitted into the budget. Of course, if your time isn't worth anything, you might as well get the cheapest CPU out there, but that doesn't mean that for a lot of people the $100 extra would make their computing experience a lot less time-consuming.

Re:Yawn

[geekoid]

However it leads to being a social outcast.

Re:Yawn

[MBGMorden]

Congratulations on missing the entire point of my post.

Nowhere in my post did I state that fast CPU's had no purpose. I explicitly stated the opposite. I for example, throw all the CPU I can afford when I setup a database server because there, I will see the ROI.

My statement was about the clock multiplier being unlocked on essentially a middle of the road (as far as cost - not performance or sales volume) chip. If the announcement had merely been about an ever-faster chip then I wouldn't have even cared.

MOST people are fine with chips costing significantly less. As I stated, you can get quad core chips now for under $100. Those are fine for 99% of what users do on a computer. If you think you need more than that to do do real work (or gaming) on a computer, you're just delusional. A 2+Ghz quad core chip is a lot more than a "can of tuna and some string".

For users with specific needs for high-cpu utilization tasks, they typically are going to be in a position where they can afford faster chips, and they're certainly not going to want to dick around with overclocking in a professional environment.

Re:Yawn

[Pharmboy]

However it leads to being a social outcast.

That is a valid point for someone under 25, but I'm in my 40s, albeit not typical, as I still game regularly and enjoy new technology on a regular basis. I also fish and garden a bit to make sure I get some exercise. I don't game socially (multi-player) very often simply because the demands of family and work make it difficult to schedule gaming, but I still play at least an hour a day. For most of us over 30, delaying gratification works out to save some money. This means when the rare something new comes out and I just MUST HAVE IT NOW, I don't feel so bad spending the money, as that is the exception rather than the rule.

Nothing to lose

[Stan Vassilev]

Intel have nothing to lose anymore by keeping the multipliers locked: the bottleneck isn't with the CPU frequency anymore. The biggest differentiators in their higher end models are number of cores and cache size.

If they can get few more sales with a pointless gimmick some fall for, why not?

Re:Nothing to lose

[petermgreen]

The biggest differentiators in their higher end models are number of cores and cache size.
I'd add the platform to that.

The low and midrange desktop chips (i3, i5 and i7 8xx) are on the LGA1156 platform. That means dual channel memory, a max memory of 16GB* and only 16 channels of fast PCIe**. What that means is that any addition storage controllers etc end up either stuck behind the PCH or stealing channels from the graphics card.

The high end desktop chips (i7 9xx) are on the x58 single socket LGA1366 platform, that means triple channel memory, a max memory of 24GB* and 36 channels of fast PCIe**.

The xeon 5500/5600 workstation/server chips are also on LGA1366 but it's a dual socket variant. That means six channels of memory (three per CPU), a max memory of 144GB* and 36 or 72 channels (depending on whether the motherboard vendor uses one or two IO hubs) of fast PCIe** (and yes there are boards that use all 72 e.g. http://www.supermicro.co.uk/products/motherboard/QPI/5500/X8DAH_.cfm ).

The higher end xeon chips support even more.

* Max memory figures for desktop chips assume 4GB modules and two modules per channel. I haven't seen a desktop board that claims to support higher configurations than this though it may technically be possible. Max memory for dual socket workstation chips assumes 8GB modules and three modules per channel, more is possible in theory if you can find 16GB modules which supposedly exist but i've never seen for sale.

** PCIe channels that run at the 2.0 speeds and are taken from the processor or IOH. Not the channels that are taken from the ICH/PCH that only run at 1.0 speeds and are potentially bottlenecked by the DMI/ESI connection.

Goes to 11

[wjousts]

It appears that both will easily hit speeds in excess of 4GHz with air cooling.

Nigel Tufnel: These go to eleven.

Re:igive up

[jaymz666]

26 other letters, or maybe only 25 other letters?

Why?

[Anonymous Coward]

"Enthusiasts" are people with more money than sense. Why would anyone pay more than $150 for a CPU these days? A quad-core 3.0Ghz chip is not going to be your bottleneck. Yeah, I guess if you spend all day ripping and encoding video then that extra 10%-20% might amount to a few minutes saved, but for most people spending the extra $150 on an SSD drive instead would give them a far more noticeable performance boost.

Or, if you've still got money to burn, buy a nicer monitor-- or a second one, for that matter. Or some quality case fans that don't make your case sound like a jet engine. Or a decent set of speakers.

The obsession with CPU "speed" is dumb.

LOL

[Jaysyn]

Well, I guess when anti-competitive practices fail.....

Depends on how you read the chart

[drinkypoo]

At the $200 price point, AMD is still killing it. Look at the scatter plot, and note what happens on the $200 line. Now, draw an imaginary $100 line, and check that out. It's all AMD. So while you may want to buy intel if you want today's fastest gaming machine, AMD is still the processor for those of us who want performance and money at the same time.

With that said, can anyone recommend a good AM3 air cooler that's not too spendy? I have a PhII X3 720 retail black edition that I'd like to overclock. The stock cooler won't cut it :) But I want to keep my budget very small, which is why I went AMD in the first place. So far, so good.

Re:Depends on how you read the chart

[drinkypoo]

What a coincidence, I got impatient and ordered one of those just now.

4GHZ

[clinko]

The cards! they bounce TOO FAST!!

Meh

[dlapine]

The article comparing values uses the highest price motherboard available for AMD for a "midrange" system, then claims that the Intel-based total system is a value. If you spend $350 on a 6-core processor, then spending $140 on a high-end motherboard is reasonable. If you're spending $99 for a low end AMD quad, you're probably in the market for more reasonably priced motherboard (~$100) to go with it. The comparison is valid for the high-end AMD cpus, but not their budget stuff, as a $40 drop in price is a big deal for a system with a $100 cpu.

That being said, being able to overclock this thing is directly aimed at the enthusiast market. "I got 6 cores, w00t!" "Yeah, well I'm at 4GHZ on a quad, so there!" It definitely improves the competition between the high end AMD hexa-cores and the midrange Intel quads, and makes the Intel option more appealing to the enthusisast.

Re:igive up

[lyml]

a b c d e f g h j k l m n o p q r s t u v w x y z å ä ö

I count 28 of them on my keyboard.

NO 1336? so you are stuck with 16 pci-e lanes so

[Joe The Dragon]

NO 1336? so you are stuck with 16 pci-e lanes so a good video card can uses that up and then when you add usb 3.0 and sata 6.0 you cut into the video pci-e lanes.

for $200 you can get a AMD board with 890fx that has more pci-e lanes so you can have 2 x16 video cards + room for sata 6.0 and usb 3.0 as well.

Nice to see AMD v Intel reversed...

[dtjohnson]

Intel Targets AMD...

Nice to see this. In the past 10 years it has always been 'AMD targets Intel.' AMD must be doing something right if Intel is taking notice of it and that means a little competition which is great for the future of the hardware.

Re:igive up

[Anonymous Coward]

Certainly doesn't speak English very well.

Please explain overclocking.

[maillemaker]

Can someone please explain overclocking to me? Why are processors sold at a slower speed than they can actually perform at? Why don't they ship from the factory at their fastest speed?

Re:Please explain overclocking.

[xiando]

Simple. You run the CPU at a higher clock speed than what it was designed for. It works, and this will give you a higher clock speed, draw more power and produce more heat. The price different really isn't that big these days and nobody really cares about overclocking anymore, but it used to be a big thing back in the day.

Re:Please explain overclocking.

[adeft]

Car analogy: Every car comes from the factory tuned in a conservative manner regarding air/fuel mixture, spark advance.....even torque management and shift pressures/points (in the case of automatics) You are able to change these values for a greater increase in performance or fuel economy. This change (when pushed to the limit or performed incorrectly) can be risky and put extra strain on components of your vehicle.

Re:Please explain overclocking.

[Fross]

Historically, they make a whole batch of processors together, then run some tests to see how fast each will run. Some go faster than others (or more to the point, some are reliable at higher speeds, some less reliable) so they get divided into different speed batches and sold at different prices.

The reasons behind the reliability are varied, however, and mostly down to heat dissipation. As the chip gets hotter (and they get v hot inside) it gets less reliable. The manufacturer tests against a standard heat diffusion system, but some people will spend more money on good cooling, either a big heatsink and fan, or even water cooling, or down to liquid nitrogen (!). The upshot is, any particular chip will be more reliable at a higher speed.

Sometimes, however, it's just about the market. It may cost $200 to manufacture your product, but some people want to buy a good product at around $300, some want to buy one at $500 and have the best. So you sell your product for $500, but nobble a few (say in firmware) to run a bit slower, and sell those for $300. Overall, you will sell many more that way than just the $500 ones, so you make more money.

This is EXACTLY what happened with the Geforce 6800GTS (If I remember correctly) - they used to manufacture dies with 4 cores on them. If it had 4 cores working, it was a high end model, if it had 3 cores working, it was a low end model. This allowed them to increase yields dramatically, as all the ones with just one fault still sold. However, the market demand for the low end one was far greater than the number of defective parts they had, so they ended up taking the 4-core model, locking one core in firmware and releasing it as a low end model - after all, selling a card at a cheaper price is better than not selling it at all, right?

The upshot was some people could programmatically unlock their 4th core, and get a high end card for low end price! I tried it myself, but had one with a defective 4th core so just got a bunch of video corruption until I locked it again :>

Re:Goes to 11, Oblig

[NotOverHere]

Obligatory XKCD
http://xkcd.com/670/

Description is flawed

[iamhassi]

"Surprisingly, even at stock speeds, the i7-875K offers better performance and power efficiency per dollar than just about any other desktop CPU out there."

-1, Inaccurate

The 2.8ghz i7-930 is $199 vs $342 for a 2.93ghz i7-875K, so almost double the price for 0.13ghz more. How did the author see that and think "better performance per dollar"? The article he linked to even shows the better performance per dollar in a chart, and btw techreport that chart is pretty piss poor, shoving $200 processors on a chart that goes to $1200 just clumps 90% of the processors in the $50 to $400 range. Learn how to make a chart: you should have left off under $50 (no processors under $50) and anything past $1000 (no processors over $1000). Because of your crappy chart the i7-875 is right next to the i7-930 despite the $142 difference.

The i7-930 is locked but it does reach 4ghz on air rather easily.

I suppose all of this is a mute because the LGA 1156 platform and LGA 1366 platform are being discontinued next year, so if you don't already have a i7 compatible motherboard you'd be buying a board that won't be compatible with any cpus made 7 months from now. I wouldn't buy a i7 cpu unless intel started selling them for $50, while AM3 boards available now are compatible with future 16-core cpus

Re:Description is flawed

[(H)elix1]

The 2.8ghz i7-930 is $199 vs $342 for a 2.93ghz i7-875K, so almost double the price for 0.13ghz more.

To be fair, the Microcenter price is a bit of a loss leader. Trying to get a 930 just about anywhere else, and it goes for ~$288. While the multiplier is locked, the FSB on both the 920 and 930 can be bumped up to some crazy amounts. My experience with the 920 let the x21 multiplier clock up to a stable 4.6ghz using a H50 cooler. Same sort of overclocks folks are seeing with the $1000 975 Extreme Edition version.

It will be nice when the stock multipliers start hovering around 4ghz by default, rather than everything dabbling around 3.

Re:Description is flawed

[TheTyrannyOfForcedRe]

I suppose all of this is a mute because...

-1, Poor Language Skills

The word you were looking for is moot not mute.

Also, the entire world does not live near a Microcenter.