News Intel release CPU upgrade cards

This is another nail in the coffin for intel in the low end market. AMD CPUs require cheaper motherboards, have a decent speed and also is overclockable. This? Intel is just getting ridiculous now. They have already done a lot to upset the enthusiast market. It looks like this will kill off the low end sector of their market. Intel may have better performance than AMD, but this really only applies to Mid and High sectors. In the low end market, they absolutely suck.

Does anyone else think that Intel is becoming the new Apple of computing?

COME ON INTEL, DONT BE W***ERS

 

"In the low end market, they absolutely suck."

Really? G6950? i3 530? unless you are talking the sub-£50 CPU but then no one can get fantastic performance from that price range and it's pointless arguing.

I don't see a problem with this at all. I also can't see what would force people to buy an AMD CPU instead because of this move unless you want to buy a CPU for under £50 then Intel isn't interested.

 

I went with the g6950 over the i5 750.. it's so cheap to buy on ebay and some guy in the forums claims a 4.4 clock on air under intels voltage spec- have to see it myself.. it goes against the reviews but usually reviews are played to that crowd (well bit is decent).. they are usually trying to sell hardware to clueless =]

if I can get 4.4 out of it.. it should negate the extra cores on the 750/760 when it comes to gaming.. if it doesn't work out- I just buy a 760 after the next price drop

looks like the nvidias 460 1gb is capable of over 900core on the xtreme forums with custom bios voltage tweaks.. wish mvtech would finish up v5.8 nibitor

 

This goes some way to help with the settings.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2010/06/24/intel-pentium-g6950-cpu-review/1

If the G6951 comes in at around the same price, then a guaranteed (overclock) increase in performance from Intel for us newbies wouldn't be a bad thing.

 

Good times My Duron 800 ran a 50% overclock on air.

 

So what happens when you sell your CPU? Does the next mug get the honour of paying an extra $50 to unlock the features again?

 

its prebuilt systems this is focused at, not people who buy the CPU itself but then again remember when they Sandy Bridge would be locked and have very limited OCing, maybe this is what they had plan and you have to buy the right to basically OC your CPU... with it being Intel it wouldnt surprise me if this was a consideration to them.

 

Intel have gone down in my estimation, they can suck my ram

 

Read this over the weekend and at first I was shocked but if they p[rice the chips low enough then I guess why not.

 

What's the price delta between buying the CPU plus unlock widget versus buying a CPU with the features this "unlocks"?

 

Next they'll be telling us we didn't buy a CPU, we bought a license to run it that is non-transferable.

After that, they will be wanting a slice of the second hand CPU sales as well...

*sigh*...why are they so desperate to rape a market they dominate anyway? I know, I know, before you all respond, all is fair in the name of capitalism and all that but do they really think it will last the efforts of the code monkeys?

These have to be destined for the OEM/pre-built market as previously mentioned or else it would make even less sense than it does at the moment.

 

Infiniti is doing that.

 

Actually, I wonder if they are selling a unlocking tool... use this to unlock some of their locked cores. Might actually be worth it. Unlock say a i7 930 and up the multiplier.

 

Sounds good to me. If the upgrade is cheaper than me just getting a better CPU to begin with, then I'll be all for it. I can't help but think it will be haxxored though too, but you never know, Intel aren't stupid.

 

makes me think of HDCP (robots comment)

 

Wouldn't be surprised if my i7 turns out to have 16 cores

 

The i3 530 is soundly beaten by the lowly Athlon II X4 630 in a number of tests, specifically multi-threaded ones. The Intel beats the AMD by a similar margin in single-core benchmarks, with its more refined architecture and higher clock speed. Looking at the range of benchmarks collectively there's little to choose between them; the i3 is a bit better for single threaded uses, the X4 pulling away slightly in multi-threaded apps. For gaming, they're tied, as most CPUs are in a balanced system. The AMD part has cheaper motherboards, a retail price that's £10 (15%!) lower than the Intel and a more friendly upgrade path (get an AM4 board then AM3 is finally dropped then when financially convenient get an AM4 CPU). Based on all of this, I'd say AMD beats Intel at this price point.

The G6950 is the same price as the AMD mentioned above, but gets absolutely thrashed in video encoding or any multi-threaded test. Some games show the difference between dual and quad core quite markedly too. The G6950 was shown to beat the Athlon X3 445 (which is £10 cheaper) with some heavy overclocking, though the AMD chip was only slightly behind in multitasking tests, which implies the AMD X4 would still beat the Intel despite the massive overclock it can handle. At stock speeds the AMD wins hands down.

Personally I'd say that's evidence to support the claim that "in the low end market they (Intel) absolutely suck". For a company with so much money and R&D power it's saddening to see that they're relying on their name to sell low-end products when they could be offering something that's actually better than their competitor's CPUs for the same price.

 

Additionally, at low end price points you are looking mostly at OEM systems, which are not designed to take advantage of overclocking, thereby nullifying the advantages of Intel superiority in that area(as in the Pentium G6950 CPU's). It would be wiser instead to offer these CPU's at a much higher stock speed.

 

My thoughts exactly.

 

The magic process is apparently performed through the use of a downloaded software program into which users enter the pin number from their upgrade card.

What the ****? So, basically it's just a softmod, that Intel wants to sell? I wonder if you can pirate these softmods.