Slashdot Mirror
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."
Really, you call yourself a news for nerds site.
I thought we learned that, like sex and the Pentium 4, faster isn't always necessarily better...
Living With a Nerd
"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.
"People who think they know everything are very annoying to those of us who do."-Mark Twain
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?
It appears that both will easily hit speeds in excess of 4GHz with air cooling.
Nigel Tufnel: These go to eleven.
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.
"You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
The cards! they bounce TOO FAST!!
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.
The Internet has no garbage collection
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.
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 :>