Blogs Are Intel's CPU offerings weak despite Coffee Lake's success?

Memory prices been what they are. Nobody is buying at the moment unless you have to.

memory prices have tripled in the last year or so

16gb memory is the bare minimum and the cheapest ddr4 3000mhz spec is a eye watering £185. Which makes all the cpus look dirt cheap at the moment.

The lowest I would buy would be 32gb and that would cost a crazy £360.

AMD and Intel both praying for memory to be cheaper me thinks.

 

I was very apprehensive about ditching Intel last year and trying AMD for the first time. Way out of my comfort zone but then I'd gotten sick of intel thermal pasted IHS and rising prices (i3 for £200+). My piezen 1700 is running at 3.92ghz with 4000mhz ram running at a lowly 3466mhz. Hardest thing for me about running AMD is living with such a low overclock. My old i5 2500k was running 4.8ghz.

My main uses for PC; Flight sims like DCS need to step into the modern multi-threaded age.. Even an 8700k at 5.1ghz isn't enough to drive a Mig 21 on DCS 1.5 on HTC Vive. 3d Rendering... AMD is good for that.

Anyway... I hope the Ryzen+ brings clock boosts. Overall I like the AMD experience and feel I'm sticking it to Intel for whatever perceived wrongs...

 

The "16 lanes" you quote are the cpu pcie lanes and are basically for the gpu only. The chipset also has a bunch of pcie lanes for use by M.2, or thunderbolt. The old z68 used by sandy bridge has 8 pcie 2.0 lanes for io, in addition to the 16 pcie lanes on the cpu for graphics. The coffeelake z370 has 24 pcie 3.0 lanes for io, in addition to 16 on the cpu for graphics.

 

8350k die size - 126 mm²
2500k die size - 216mm2

So the die is nearly twice as small and they've put it on a thinner substrate. Yet they are charging the same cash for it.

That is what I have issue with. Intel have not reduced prices at all, they are just fooling people. I'm not denying their performance and so on but they need to drop prices. AMD are just so much cheaper.

 

Do you mean you would expect a lower price because of the potential for increased yield per wafer?

I'm sure they would argue R&D investment for the reduced fab size offsets that. I'm not saying I agree, but I'd bet on that being their position.

 

Yeah, and to be honest I don't think that's entirely unreasonable. Not sure you can expect a direct correlation between die size (now and 6 years ago) and price, given that there are all sorts of other factors to consider.

I mean, there are loads of things to bash Intel for, but this isn't one of them imho.

 

They do seem to be struggling recently. I've not seen much reason to upgrade from a i5-2500k and Intel seems to be struggling with 10nm.
It isn't the price I mind so much as the lack of performance increase.

 

Ah, it seems that I had a misunderstanding about the lanes.

 

Chipset lanes aren't as handy though as CPU lanes because you are limited by the DMI bus from Chipset to CPU (which is approx. equivalent to 4 lanes of bandwidth) . Put a couple of fast things on chipset lanes on there you can saturate that bus and slow your system right down.

fine for a couple of SATA drives, wifi, USB etc but that is about it.

 

From the Bit-tech reviews of both, which I assume are the prices at the time of review:



2500K - $216 ex-tax (no UK price listed)

8350K - $168 ex-tax (£159)

I don't understand why you think the size of the substrate should be a factor into the price Intel charge (entirely up to Intel what they think they can charge) but the point stands that the launch pricing of the 8350K is about 25% lower than the 2500K and that doesn't factor inflation in either.

The key problem to me is simple overpricing - I notice that the 8350K pricing is a link to overclockers who currently want £169 for it (£10 more than the review price), despite the £-$ exchange rate currently being £1-$1.4297 which is the highest it's been since the EU vote and around 10c per £ better than at the time of review.

I don't know if CPUs are in short supply as well but it doesn't help a scratch build, and that's before getting into RAM/GPU prices.


Ultimately though, the rumours of Intel pushing Cannonlake core counts up again and a likely imminent launch of Ryzen2 also make it imho pointless to upgrade for the time being.​

 

Coffee Lake was in very short supply for the first couple weeks after launch, gotten much better since then though.