Blogs Non K-edition baseclock overclocking fiasco: Is it good or bad for Intel?

5% IPC increase over Haswell/Devils Canyon.

That's why Intel Skylake sales are slow.

If you want people to spend £300+ on your flagship i7 CPU, you will have to do better than that Intel.

Your laziness is creating a market that is now feeding off itself, your high end chip sales are being cannibalised by your lower end and previous gen products.

 

Just gonna point out that the 17-6700K OEM version is £30 cheaper than the retail version making it £20 cheaper than the X99 chip.

Also:
'The Pentium G3258 clearly had its limitations. Its lack of 4 physical cores hurt it in a number of benchmarks'

This could do with rewording as i3 CPUs (which it is compared against) don't have 4 physical cores either although they do have 4 logical cores which the Pentium does not.

Back to the topic, I think there are two significant reasons why Skylake hasn't sold as well as it could have.
1: Sales have continuously fallen or at least slowed as people just don't want to or need to upgrade as often as they used to 10-15 years ago. More and more people buy laptops instead of desktops too which totally removes the possibility of future upgrading without just buying a whole new machine which again is often seen as too much hassle and generally not required for their needs.
2: The cost of Skylake is sickening... Go back to the Q6600 which for many was the default chip of choice and it was stable at £130 and for even a time (a few months) was available for £115, compare that with the i5K and you are looking at £200. Even motherboards have jumped up in price just from the last gen where the best Z97 ITX boards on offer from MSI, ASUS (excluding the Impact) were to be had for just over the £100 mark where as with Z170 you are looking around the £130 mark.
Putting it all together just makes the upgrade seem too expensive and impractical. People are much more likely to buy new hardware when they feel that they are getting something special and nothing is special when you pay top dollar for it.

 

CPU market is very stale, AMD is none compete and Intel are in 5-10% land. Unless your doing something but gaming on a PC the performance benefits from upgrading are minimal.

Power users only need apply, and that's power users of photo/ video/ 3D work/ or using software that can take advantage of multiple threads.

Games have not really gone anywhere and that's why the performance benefit from older hardware is really small to none existent

 

I'm running Sandy and see no reason to spend £500 to end exactly where I am now. **** you Intel ill wait and see if Zen can do something.

 

@SchizoFrog, Wouldn't you have to adjust for inflation?

All, or parts of my calculation maybe wrong as maths isn't my forte, but (AFAIK) the Q6600 came out in 2007 and cost $851, four months later that dropped to $530 and later again dropped to $266

If my calculations are correct that would, adjusted for inflation, price them at $974, $606, and $304, converting (using 2007 exchange rates) those to £ that's around £480, £300, and £150, that's unless I've just made a total A of my self in public, but then what's new.

 

I was undecided on whether to buy a 4th or 6th Gen i7 K series, after hearing about the base clocking, I ultimately went for 6th Gen non K. Now after getting it, I have found that to carry out the OC you have to disable C-States on the CPU so it'll run at what ever frequency I OC to and that is it.
I must admit, not overly happy about that so hoping with future BIOS releases they manage to sort that out else I am stuck with standard clocks on the i7.

 

That Skylake had decoupled internal clock generation was hardly a secret (and known since at least April). If anything, it's rather unusual that it took months after launch for motherboard manufacturers to expose the options to modify internal clocks independently. The PCIe bus lockstep was the major stability issue with baseclock changes, but any baseclock change results in asynchronous transfers between internal busses operating at different speeds, which software may not handle gracefully.

 

@Corky,
Inflation gets all to easily labelled as the reason things are more expensive and on the whole, it just isn't true for most cases. I remember buying an nVidia 4600Ti way back when for £300 which was the second top most GPU at that time... Current price of a 970... around the £300 mark, especially at launch and it is only in the latest gens that we now have additional upper extreme level GPUs of the Titan and the 980Ti...

 

I have a 6700K that is dedicated to folding. It will have at least one high end Pascal card when they are released, and will have 4 x 4 TB disks in RAID 5 when I can afford them, so will double as a torrent box.

 

Am I bonkers, or was the generation before Sandy Bridge the same way? Seemed like a BFD back then, and I remember people acting like they were being raptured when SB dropped and the 2500K was released, bringing back multiplier-based OC to the people.

 

Second most powerful GPUs would be one of those 'extreme' gpus as you call them, not the 970, regardless of which camp you're in - the "it's a new tier of GPU camp", or the "they've released the mid tier as high end and labelled the high end as 'premium' and added lots of £££ to the price" camp. I think someone on OC forums made a point about inflation and how the price has remained pretty much inline. Though aren't node shrinks supposed to counter this?

I'm still expecting intel to push out an update to stop the overclocking tbh.

 

Yes the chips before Sandy could *all* be clocked on the FSB. The Clarkdale Pentium was fantastic, as was the I3. It offered budget gamers something that really hauled ass.

There were no extreme editions on that socket but Intel were making EE for X58 with unlocked multiplers (and stupid prices) for years. Ever since the first P4 EE really.

It was only with Sandy that they decided to railroad the enthusiast into one of two products. Which was cool I guess but it left those on lower budgets with really poor, low clocked CPUs meaning they would have to replace them far more often. Win win for Intel then I suppose but bad for the consumer.

I'm hoping that this is a deliberate move by Intel to win back all of their customers who strayed to AMD. AMD's 8 cores were good for a while but now they are starting to show their age and budget users are again being offered drippings by Intel.

All we need now are some proper budget boards capable of overclocking and job's a goodun. If not then people will just return to the FX 6300 and so on.

 

From the limited info and research I've done it seems the prices we pay have continued to fall, either that or we get more for a similar price.

 

I'm glad I bought a durable motherboard when I got Sandy Bridge, it's even out of its 5 year warranty at this point. (not a hiccup, of course.)

 

Yea I'm still waiting for something to replace my phenom ii 955. I could get marginal improvement and go AMD or go Intel and get a dual core which is again a sidewards move. It would also mean my desktop would struggle to be an improvement on my sandy bridge laptop.
Its actually embarrassing that nothing "better" has came along tho the other side of that, what has came a long that requires an upgrade anyway?
I think as well Intel will need to monitor the motherboard companies. If they do indeed disappear, no thanks to Intels stance on overclocking, the cost of skylake could continue to increase further

 

exactly...add to the fact that an upgrade to skylake wasnt just a new cpu, or even cpu+mobo...this was cpu+mobo+ram, for a market that is dying, populated only by power users and gamers as rollo stated, and not enough of an increase in performance to warrant that cost...i myself debated for a cpl months, but in the end bought a 4130 for the kid and a new card for me...and honestly...when was the last time a new cpu release improved like pentium d to core?

 

In the last year or so, I finally got around to completing a couple of budget builds - a Q6600 o/c'd that I picked up cheap, with DDR3 and an SSD for my parents and they're over the moon with the improvement from their old P4.

I also knocked up an o'c'd 2500K Sandy for my mate who's a casual gamer, with an Asus Gene-Z IV and a GTX460, all to keep costs down and it plays exactly every game he wants to play at decent settings on a 1920x1200 screen, with room to upgrade the GPU as and when necessary.

The last one I finally got my bum into gear to complete was my own o/c'd 2500K with twin GTX670s and although I completely understand it's no major benchmark, it runs Ryse at 60 fps with everything at max except supersampling (which I have to turn off).

My point is that for a range of needs, all the above have been obtained cheaply and have proven more than adequate. I accept that there are people whose requirements stretch MUCH further than ours (professional heavy users notwithstanding), so they will no doubt welcome the incremental advances, but I must say it leaves me personally feeling like there's no real need to bat an eyelid.

My next two upgrades are to swap a 460 Hawk into my music machine just because it won't be my gaming box and build a small one for the lounge with a 560Ti in to stream from my main gaming box.

I'm positive the above will raise many a snort of derision, but whenever I see people swapping out their Ivy Bridge/770 setup for a Haswell/970 combo, I do wonder if they're either sponsored or just more obsessed/enthusiastic than I am.

 

I only upgrade from a 2500k because it died after 4 years of 5ghz. Who gives a **** if its good or bad for intel?

 

They dropped Z170 into a market occupied by X99 and Z97, as far as I can tell with the only thing really going for it being USB Type C, and you pay for that not only with a new motherboard and CPU but also new RAM if you're coming from Z97 or anything prior to it.

Quite frankly I'm angry at Intel's flaccid releases especially as I'm still sitting here hoping my overclocked X58 doesn't give up the ghost before a worthwhile replacement comes around because I don't want to feel ripped off.