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

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

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.

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

[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.

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.

Re:Is this news?

[GigaplexNZ]

They didn't, IT World got it wrong.