Intel Kills a Top-of-the-Line Processor

itwbennett writes: In June of this year, Intel announced a processor branded as Broadwell-C. Now, the company has confirmed that the part was cancelled but would not give an official reason. Why did Intel kill the Broadwell-C? ITworld's Andy Patrizio speculates that it's a 'combination of increased cost, lower yield and potential product cannibalization' — cannibalization of the company's newly-launched Skylake processor, which the Broadwell-C outperformed.

Comments

They don't want Skylake to be fast

[Overzeetop]

i7 series parts top out at $1000, Xeon E5-4xxx series parts start at $1000

Why would you want your cheap consumer grade hardware cannibalizing your bread and butter business chips? The large cloud providers have already shifted to "consumer" hard drives to save money, knowing that their failure rates will be more than compensated for by lower unit costs.

Re:They don't want Skylake to be fast

[ShanghaiBill]

The large cloud providers have already shifted to "consumer" hard drives to save money, knowing that their failure rates will be more than compensated for by lower unit costs.

Consumer drives do NOT have higher failure rates. The myth that "enterprise" drives are more reliable has been debunked by research done by Backblaze and Google.

Re:Maybe they found a backdoor

[denis-The-menace]

FYI: In theory, all newer Intel chips have Backdoors:

http://libreboot.org/faq/#inte...

Re:Is this news?

[Austerity Empowers]

I think it's news because many people feel the Broadwell-C was the better chip and that possibly SkyLake would be eclipsed. The things you can do when you're a monopoly are bad for the customer. I

Lies

[Tailhook]

Benchmarks of Skylake i7-6700K vs Broadwell i7-5775C show the Skylake CPU to be faster. Cheaper too. The Broadwell chip can perform better on some OpenCL tasks due to the Iris Pro integrated GPU, but non-GPU tasks handled by integer and floating point units, cryptography and media extensions are always faster on the Skylake CPU. The "which the Broadwell-C outperformed" part is stupid sour grapes from an unhappy little malcontent.

Re:Lies

[aliquis]

Skylake outperformed in doing the same instructions over and over in benchmarks but Broadwell outperformed in games.

Re:Lies

[Kjella]

Yes, pretty much the only thing it did better was integrated gaming though at a $2-300 premium you could use that for a significantly better discrete GPU. The only thing it was good for was a stylish AIO where you couldn't fit anything bigger, my guess is Apple didn't want it for any iMac so volume would be too small. Also Skylake is really small when it comes to die size, so I guess the profit margin is actually better than selling Broadwells.

Re:Lies

[rtb61]

Perhaps they might make a much smarter move like redesigning the CPU. Discrete GPU process, "hey I noticed you have a separate GPU doing the work I was designed to do, do you want me to do something else, like crunch numbers or do AI stuff".

Re:Lies

[aliquis]

Not at the same speeds.

At first this made me confused.

But yeah, Skylake is clocked higher and that's likely mostly why it beat Broadwell in benchmark tasks whereas Broadwell have more cache and and tweaks which obviously made it better for games even though lower clocked.

The speed / MHz I wouldn't call important though because it's a simple fact that Broadwell i5 and i7 C-cpus are lower clocked and that's how it is. What matter is how they actually perform not "but if!"

I don't agree they are poor over-clockers though. Swedish Sweclockers thought they was but they only looked at the resulting clock-speed and yeah, the 6700K can likely do 5 GHz something the 5775C likely won't. But the 6700K stock is 4 GHz whereas the 5775C is 3.3 GHz so in percent they both over-clock quite well and likely by about the same amount/percent.

How much (as a ratio) you can over-clock should be what's important, not what frequency you end up with.

Re:Lies

[aliquis]

In the comparison I saw, Broadwell-C outperforms by an inconsequential amount in games that are CPU bound (5%). So yes, with Broadwell-C you can pace Civ 5 etc at 125fps instead of 119fps. Those are meaningless numbers from a playability perspective.

I wouldn't call them meaningless. Regardless no-one said there was a huge difference or that you should bother.

Even the i7 4790K isn't far away from the i7 6700K Skylake one so you could even go with that which is also cheaper.

And speaking about prices and old models the i7 5820K would likely give 6700K a run in modern game titles too.

If you go further back the i7 4770K, i7 3770K and possibly the i7 2700K isn't terrible and far away either, per generation at least. You likely got like less than 10% of extra performance for each new one. And that's when you ignore 5775C (as in 6700K not being 1.1*1.1 times better than the 4790K.)

That a supposedly uninteresting chip with better integrated graphics clocked at 3.3 GHz can outrun the newer chip on the new platform clocked at 4.0 GHz in gaming was a surprise for people.

Speaking of over-clocking and the 5775C vs 6700K the 5820K likely over-clocks very well as-well (The metal capsule/lid over it is supposed to be soldered on that one if I remember correctly, the 8-core one over-clocks nicely and the 6-core one should have an easier time I suppose unless lower quality.)

Re:Maybe they found a backdoor

[Hadlock]

It's called Intel vPro technology, which lets you run a hardware session of VLC from the BIOS, on the wall side of the power control. It's pretty impressive shit for enterprise but you can do a whole lot more with it obviously.

One Source

[Princeofcups]

At one time the open software community was proud of porting their software to every hardware platform. Now people don't even know or care that there are alternatives to x86/x64 architecture. Nor do they know about the days when hardware shipped crippled, unless you paid the upgrade cost to remove a jumper. I fear that those days are returning.

Re:Is this news?

[alvinrod]

It doesn't make sense for Intel to kill Broadwell-C when they can just charge more for the performance premium. It's not as though Intel is under any obligation to sell the chip for less money because it's not the newest technology.

yield problems

[edxwelch]

Iris Pro was first introduced with Haswell with much fanfare. There were both as desktop and laptop versions. But in reality the products barely existed. There is only a handfull of design wins, which sold in very small quantities.
Now, we have a product based on Broadwell Iris Pro that's cancelled. At this point it's looking like Intel were having major yield problems with the production of the on chip eDRAM.

Better question

[Moof123]

A better question is why we have plateaued on performance so badly. 7700k vs 4770k is a wash at best after 2 years for power and performance (way less than a Moore's law cycle would lead you to expect). Consumer grade processors are stuck at 4 cores, and now we get to pay for a bunch of low end GPU die area that will never get used. I don't get it.

Give me a 6 core with no GPU over a 4 core with a low end GPU any day.

Intel denies chip line being killed

[Fallen Kell]

Intel responded to Anandtech's inquiry into the killing of the chip line and denies that it is dead and in fact is wondering where the bad information has come from:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/9639/the-death-of-intels-broadwell-is-greatly-exaggerated-socketed-broadwell-continues

Re:Is this news?

[tsotha]

It isn't news because it's pure speculation. There's no support for the idea Intel killed it for nefarious monopolist (as if Intel were a monopoly) reasons. If they were really playing those kinds of games they would never have greenlighted the project to start with. It's far more likely either the project wasn't meeting expectations or they have some nearly-finished technology they want to incorporate into the next top-of-the-line part.

Re:Is this news?

[GigaplexNZ]

They didn't, IT World got it wrong.