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Why did Intel feel the need to paper launch the Core i7-6700K?
There will eventually be a bunch of bins of the Sky Lake quad core CPU. That's how Intel handles it every generation. See, for example, what they did with Haswell quad cores:
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100007671 4814 600436886 600030236
And that's just desktops. Among servers, there's this:
http://ark.intel.com/products/family/78581/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-v3-Family#@All
And a whole bunch of laptop bins, too. All of those except for the Xeon E3 1220L are the same chip, possibly up to a respin or two.
For Sky Lake, Intel started with some high bin desktop quad cores, with the Core i5-6600K and the Core i7-6700K. But while the former has been plentiful since launch, the latter is basically nowhere to be found. That presumably means that very, very few of the dies can meet the specs for the latter.
Sometimes you paper launch a product because you know that your competitor is way ahead and you've got something that will narrow the gap considerably or perhaps even take the lead. See, for example, the Radeon R9 Fury X, or to go back a little further, the GeForce GTX 680. You do that because you want people to wait and buy your product rather than buying a competitor because you're not remotely competitive. That's obviously not Intel's situation today, where AMD is so uncompetitive that for their last two generations, they haven't even bothered releasing server/high-end desktop parts at all.
So why a paper launch? My theory is that Intel is trying to maintain the perception that their CPUs are still improving and so it's still worth upgrading. Sandy Bridge was a great CPU in its day, so much so that it could be clocked far away from the chip's real limits and still handily beat older generations. Ivy Bridge was a little better but not much, but Intel was able to maintain the perception of progress by setting a higher stock clock speed so that stock Ivy Bridge beat stock Sandy Bridge by a decent margin, even if overclocking both basically eliminated that gap. Going from Ivy Bridge to Haswell was similar.
But then 14 nm got delayed. I mean really delayed, more so than 22 nm. Rather than having nothing new, Intel came out with Devil's Canyon, a refresh of Haswell. Basically, take the same old Haswell chips and factory overclock them. Thus, we got the Core i5-4690K and the Core i7-4790K. With the latter especially, instead of having to overclock yourself and hope you were lucky with the die you got, Intel would essentially do it for you with a fairly conservative overclock. Even though they had nothing new to offer, higher clock speeds maintained the appearance of progress.
Then came Broadwell, which was unambiguously slower than Haswell, on top of being extremely delayed. But with a large Crystallwell cache, it was a laptop chip from the start and not terribly interesting in desktops. But Sky Lake could very easily have also been slower than Devil's Canyon, and that would have been hugely embarrassing to Intel.
The solution? Release a top bin of Sky Lake that is clocked just high enough to barely edge out a Core i7-4790K. Hardly any dies can meet that bin? Oh well, you don't sell many of them. But reviewers for launch-day reviews don't know that, so they say hey, Sky Lake is great. And then hopefully people go to buy one and if the flagship is out of stock, buy some lower bin instead.
Launch day shenanigans to try to bias reviews from gullible reviewers have been around for quite a while, of course. One of the more notorious was the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW. Recall that Fermi was a disaster, so AMD won by miles in whatever efficiency metrics you care about and could set their lineup however they wanted. When the Radeon HD 6870 was about to launch, Nvidia picked out a handful of the best dies for a GTX 460, overclocked them to ridiculous margins, gave them to EVGA to make a super overclocked version of the card, and sent out samples to reviewers with the hint that they ought to compare a stock Radeon HD 6870 to an extremely overclocked GTX 460.
Some less than reputable reviewers bit and basically recommended that people buy the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW rather than a Radeon HD 6870. Never mind that the former was a publicity stunt that sold out within days and was very quickly discontinued, that more than a few of them weren't stable at their factory overclocked "stock" speed, or that you could have overclocked a 6870, too.
Even so, what does it say about Intel that they're so far ahead of AMD and still feel the need to pull such deceptive review shenanigans? Perhaps that their marketing people feel a need to do something to justify their existence?
http://www.newegg.com/Product/ProductList.aspx?Submit=ENE&IsNodeId=1&N=100007671 4814 600436886 600030236
And that's just desktops. Among servers, there's this:
http://ark.intel.com/products/family/78581/Intel-Xeon-Processor-E3-v3-Family#@All
And a whole bunch of laptop bins, too. All of those except for the Xeon E3 1220L are the same chip, possibly up to a respin or two.
For Sky Lake, Intel started with some high bin desktop quad cores, with the Core i5-6600K and the Core i7-6700K. But while the former has been plentiful since launch, the latter is basically nowhere to be found. That presumably means that very, very few of the dies can meet the specs for the latter.
Sometimes you paper launch a product because you know that your competitor is way ahead and you've got something that will narrow the gap considerably or perhaps even take the lead. See, for example, the Radeon R9 Fury X, or to go back a little further, the GeForce GTX 680. You do that because you want people to wait and buy your product rather than buying a competitor because you're not remotely competitive. That's obviously not Intel's situation today, where AMD is so uncompetitive that for their last two generations, they haven't even bothered releasing server/high-end desktop parts at all.
So why a paper launch? My theory is that Intel is trying to maintain the perception that their CPUs are still improving and so it's still worth upgrading. Sandy Bridge was a great CPU in its day, so much so that it could be clocked far away from the chip's real limits and still handily beat older generations. Ivy Bridge was a little better but not much, but Intel was able to maintain the perception of progress by setting a higher stock clock speed so that stock Ivy Bridge beat stock Sandy Bridge by a decent margin, even if overclocking both basically eliminated that gap. Going from Ivy Bridge to Haswell was similar.
But then 14 nm got delayed. I mean really delayed, more so than 22 nm. Rather than having nothing new, Intel came out with Devil's Canyon, a refresh of Haswell. Basically, take the same old Haswell chips and factory overclock them. Thus, we got the Core i5-4690K and the Core i7-4790K. With the latter especially, instead of having to overclock yourself and hope you were lucky with the die you got, Intel would essentially do it for you with a fairly conservative overclock. Even though they had nothing new to offer, higher clock speeds maintained the appearance of progress.
Then came Broadwell, which was unambiguously slower than Haswell, on top of being extremely delayed. But with a large Crystallwell cache, it was a laptop chip from the start and not terribly interesting in desktops. But Sky Lake could very easily have also been slower than Devil's Canyon, and that would have been hugely embarrassing to Intel.
The solution? Release a top bin of Sky Lake that is clocked just high enough to barely edge out a Core i7-4790K. Hardly any dies can meet that bin? Oh well, you don't sell many of them. But reviewers for launch-day reviews don't know that, so they say hey, Sky Lake is great. And then hopefully people go to buy one and if the flagship is out of stock, buy some lower bin instead.
Launch day shenanigans to try to bias reviews from gullible reviewers have been around for quite a while, of course. One of the more notorious was the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW. Recall that Fermi was a disaster, so AMD won by miles in whatever efficiency metrics you care about and could set their lineup however they wanted. When the Radeon HD 6870 was about to launch, Nvidia picked out a handful of the best dies for a GTX 460, overclocked them to ridiculous margins, gave them to EVGA to make a super overclocked version of the card, and sent out samples to reviewers with the hint that they ought to compare a stock Radeon HD 6870 to an extremely overclocked GTX 460.
Some less than reputable reviewers bit and basically recommended that people buy the EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW rather than a Radeon HD 6870. Never mind that the former was a publicity stunt that sold out within days and was very quickly discontinued, that more than a few of them weren't stable at their factory overclocked "stock" speed, or that you could have overclocked a 6870, too.
Even so, what does it say about Intel that they're so far ahead of AMD and still feel the need to pull such deceptive review shenanigans? Perhaps that their marketing people feel a need to do something to justify their existence?
Comments
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
Had a big laugh at the diatribe above about the Nvidia 460. Sorry to break your bubble but that was a darn good card, still use mine it runs almost everything on high settings. The HD 6870 I had did not last a year, a real POS card that was.
Having to buy a new motherboard and cpu for a slight incremental increase is just ludicrous. If you have intel stock, it is sell time.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/9231/amds-20162017-x86-roadmap-zen-is-in
Perhaps you missed the point. I wasn't saying that all GeForce GTX 460 cards were awful. I was saying that one particular SKU was a marketing stunt. The stock clock speed was 675 MHz. While factory overclocks are common, the top overclock speed from most Nvidia board partners was in the ballpark of 800 MHz, as that was about as high as the chips could go. The EVGA GeForce GTX 460 FTW was clocked at 850 MHz. Hardly any chips could meet that, so it was a very short-lived SKU, around just long enough for a marketing stunt to try to slant some reviews.
Pursuit of higher clock speeds has been a thing of the past for ages; getting the same for less power, improving the on-board graphics, developing the bus as well as the processor and using ever smaller dies. Helps explain what the refreshes are - a part of the "tick tock" process Intel have pursued since 2007.
Hence Broadwell which you seem to dismiss - much delayed sure - is very significant because it is a low power chip with significant embedded HD graphics; basically its for mobile devices. Skylark, more oomph but more power and without the significant graphics is the desktop chip (although still impressive).
And because stuff is complicated they need to communicate their plans to e.g. motherboard manufacturers. In advance. And the biggest steps forward with Skylark may not be the processor - however impressive it looks - but the supporting arcitecture.
They are publicly traded, so they have to maintain an illusion of progress for Wall Street.
And thanks for the link, i learned something new now but i am a bit confused regarding Zen, why x86? why not x64 and x86 both?
Boobs are LIFE, Boobs are LOVE, Boobs are JUSTICE, Boobs are mankind's HOPES and DREAMS. People who complain about boobs have lost their humanity.
It has saved me a fortune by making what would normally have made 2 pc upgrades over the past 4 years, go from several grand to only $600 or so.
To find an intelligent person in a PUG is not that rare, but to find a PUG made up of "all" intelligent people is one of the rarest phenomenons in the known universe.
I'm starting to think we need alien technology to really drive things forward
“Microtransactions? In a single player role-playing game? Are you nuts?”
― CD PROJEKT RED
Have to keep the gears turning. You have to keep funding the R&D and to do that, you have to keep the revenue stream rolling. The majority of the time it's evolution and once in a while you get a revolution.
They have to make sales to advance, R&D is very costly and to expect every step to be revolutionary is just unrealistic.
"Be water my friend" - Bruce Lee
That's an interesting theory that I hadn't considered, and it does have a lot of explanatory power here. But how closely do Wall Street types check on reviews? If the Core i7-6700K were clocked 200 MHz lower and thus slower than a Core i7-4790K, would Wall Street notice the difference? (That's a serious question, and one to which I don't know the answer.)
Not lazy. It is no accident. It isn't just consumers who don't want to have to change motherboards every 12 months but manufacturers as well. Retailers as well. It takes time to build manufacturing facilities. Retailers don't want to be continually holding fire sales because of the next "new" big thing. And they want you to be confident that if you buy an Intel solution you will be able to refresh it with a new CPU down the line if you want. Absolutely no accident that Skylark will be the first cpu that needs a new board since Sandy.
And - as you say - modern processors are very powerful and can run modern games so why would Intel focus on even faster processors? They have been getting faster (10-15% over Haswell, 30% over Broadwell, 45% over Sandy) but the big gains have been to get the same computing power on a smaller (so cheaper) chip using less power. Less power = less heat and noise; better battery life if appropriate; smaller cpu, fan, motor, more space on the cpu for onboard HD capable graphics. All of which helps the push for NUC designs. And lets not forget Skylark also adds usb 3.1; native usb c; PCIe storage and better turbo features. And nearly forgot: DDR4 - again lower power. It hasn't been about clock cycles for for over a decades.
And you will find that financial analysts understand full well that Intel's new chips are after the market for phones, TVs, tablets, ... robotic lawn mowers, watches, fridges, microwaves, even kettles! OK kettles may be a little far fetched but the market for small + powerful + power efficient is huge.
It's all in public perception. As long as it appears that they have a market, and they are increasing marketshare, the investors will be happy. That's why Intel has thrown a lot of resources into chasing the ultra-low power ARM segment. A charismatic CEO who can explain away problems is often worth more than an engineering staff that can actually fix the problems.
Wall Street is a very funny thing. It's more fueled by emotion and perception than fact.
The most interesting thing I took from it was the supposed analysis of the PC sales market in recent years: slumped because of tablets, picked up because businesses phased out XP, and then slumped again because everyone is, supposedly, waiting for Skylake. So it appears that investors are really watching sales, not really performance, from Intel - if Skylake can lift the year-over-year, they will call it a success for whatever reason Intel wants to let them call it a success - if that's wireless charging, reduced power consumption, or better performance in high-end gaming rigs. And if sales are lackluster, Intel will feel the wrath of Wall Street (unless they can come up with another good reason that seems to make sense on the surface, like Tablet sales, or waiting for Windows 10 to become stable, or whatever they can dream up).
http://www.wsj.com/articles/intel-overhauls-chips-in-bid-to-revive-pc-sales-1441155601
Fluff they relesed since then is just that - fluff for premium price. And ever changing Intel platform doesnt make it easier to sell chips.
Take Skylake - new chip (i5-k)+new (expencive) mobo + new (expencive) RAM = over 500$ for marginal upgrade and most of people will need new OS to go with it. Spending 500-600$ on new GPU - now were talking.
I *know* that upgrading from my 2600k is performance wise, not a good value proposition. However, i have other reasons to upgrade, mainly i want to gift my current PC to my nephew. I can't do that without a new PC, and if im going to buy new hardware im going to get the current gen. Its as simple as that.
There's more to the picture than just price/perf.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Honestly, i think it has more to do with a lack of any real competition from nvidia. Intel hasn't been put into a position where they have to push the envelope to compete or to maintain a lead. I really think the ones to blame for the current state of CPUs is AMD in this equation. Intel is just doing what a smart business does in this type of situation.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche
Nothing but love and respect Ceratop...
Added at edit: for some weird reason I had to make this statement, but what is weird is I like your statements; go figure!!!
Most people buying Intel processors are not buying the same thing you or I would buy. The K-series are a niche product for a niche market, not their sales leaders. ~Most~ people just look to see that it has an Intel CPU in it, and look no farther than that (a lot of which are IT departments submitting orders for hundreds or thousands of generic workstations for offices and cubicles). It could be a lowly underclocked M-version that some large OEM got a good bulk deal on and stuck in a lot of models, but it says Intel, and that's all that they know.
Second - remember back in the early-mid 00's, when AMD's Athlon was a better performer than Intel? Did AMD surpass Intel in market share? Did ~most~ people flock out and buy AMD CPUs? Not really, because at that same time Intel stepped up their "Intel Inside" marketing campaign, hired on the Blue Man Group, and came up with that trademark 3-tone jungle that stuck in everyone's heads.
Marketing has a much larger influence than we like to give it credit for. And you have to realize that you and I (and most people on this forums) are just a tiny fraction of all CPU users, and we are very much a niche community and not indicative of the overall PC user base.
To my knowledge, Intel doesn't release sales volumes of CPU SKUs - but I wouldn't be surprised to see the highest volume exists in the mediocre i3 and i5 lines that consist mainly of salvage parts and are dumped off in bulk on OEM builders like Dell and HP at steep discounts. I would say that shows a successful marketing campaign, but not necessarily "success" when it comes to class-leading performance.
I think you are correct 100% here. I always though it was a shame that companies like Cyrix and Transmeta weren't able to get much traction and turn it into a more than two pony race.
As far as competition goes did you mean NVidia? Or AMD / Radeon? Doesn't really matter because I think your point is both valid and invalid. As far as cpus go the fact that AMD do not occupy the high ground is probably a factor in Intel looking at other stuff like power consumption; they might have done this anyway however - as many have said cpus are very powerful. The new cpus however are getting increasingly powerful onboard graphics and as their cpus get smaller and more efficient they are aiming to take a bigger share of all things mobile. So I think they are focused on competitors just not AMD per se (they won't ignore what they are doing obviously). Hence valid and invalid comment.
Tech just creeps these days. It's probably partly them milking the market as much as possible, partly lack of competition, but a big part of it is game design. Consoles hold back everything because so many of the big games that could be pushing tech are not pushing tech because they're holding themselves back to be playable on the always out of date consoles.
As long as devs are designing with consoles in mind, or worse, with consoles first, tech is going to creep along, and I'm sure that suits the tech manufacturers just fine since they can pace out their "content" over years with marginal incremental upgrades that some people will pay for even when they don't need it.
Premium MMORPGs do not feature built-in cheating via cash for gold pay 2 win. PLAY to win or don't play.
Even Intel fanbois are dissapointed lol and thats a rare sight
If you have sandy or above you have 0 reason to upgrade. Because Sandy OCs much better than Skylake and then they are even. 4 years later.
They also are overclocking well, not quite sandy bridge well, but considering they are already starting at 4ghz and people are easily hitting 4.8 to 4.9, thats a good OC margin.
Please stop spewing nonsense.
"The surest way to corrupt a youth is to instruct him to hold in higher esteem those who think alike than those who think differently."
- Friedrich Nietzsche