Opinion: Things Intel Needs to Fix

[Julio Franco]

As the market leader and long time dominant force in the CPU space, Intel's been able to get away with a lot and this is partly because the competition has allowed them to. In this column we're looking at possible improvements from the consumers' perspective and specific to Intel's personal computing side of the business.

Read the full article here.

https://www.techspot.com/article/1644-things-intel-needs-to-fix/

 

[TrexAverell]

So the ball is on your side now guys : buy AMD !

 

[BSim500]

- Good article Steve. Although most people replace it anyway / have an existing HS/fan leftover from previous build, I agree their stock heatsink + 75mm fan needs an upgrade. The Ryzen coolers + existing Noctua L9i shows that a 92mm fan can easily fit any board / case (even small ITX) yet still remain under 40mm height (L9i can even take industry standard 92mm x 25mm dimension replacement fans and still be under 50mm which is still within limits of cases like the Fractal Node 202). I'm pretty sure it wouldn't cost them the earth to come up with a mass produced OEM version of that similar to Ryzen Stealth for far less that L9i's premium retail price, and not much more than the 75mm now.

- As for the +45% premium of the i3-8350K vs i3-8100, yeah that doesn't make any sense vs the i5-8400. Never used to be that way either (eg, i5-3570K was only +6-10% more vs i5-3570). Definitely something AMD needs to put pressure on to "keep it real".

- I also don't see the need for 4x tiers of consumer motherboards either. H310 is too closely priced to B360 to make any sense at all given its 1/4 PCH bandwidth. Likewise, I've long been wondering who buys H170/270/370's (too close to Z) over B150/250/360s for non-OC budget builds. Intel could drop from 4 down to 3x consumer tiers and lose literally nothing.

(Rant) - Motherboard manufacturers share a lot of "fake feature segmentation" blame though (Intel & AMD alike). 30x almost identical variants of boards each generation, of which 26x are unnecessary replications that somehow manage to all lack the one trivial / inexpensive to implement feature you want, eg, 2x2 Wi-Fi that actually works at 887Mbps not crippled to 1x1 443Mbps, a better ALC1xx0 sound chip vs cheap ALC887 or optical SPDIF out for a HTPC build (30x "LED's" onboard - but not the one that's actually useful...)

 

[alabama man]

I don't need a fan/heatsink nor integrated gpu. That money could be used to swap the tooth paste to solder and if they asked the same price they would still make more money. They should have a separate gaming/enthusiast lineup below enterprise level pricing, not paying 3 times more to not get iGPU and fan/sink as I don't really need more cores, ecc or other xeon stuff.

 

[tomkaten]

About time someone called them out on all the BS they've been feeding us for about a decade now. Nothing else to add here. Thanks for the insightful article, Steve !

 

[Theinsanegamer]

The ball is in AMD's court. Intel has grown slovenly and it shows. Now, if ?AMD could just close the IPC gap once and for all.....

I don't need a fan/heatsink nor integrated gpu. That money could be used to swap the tooth paste to solder and if they asked the same price they would still make more money. They should have a separate gaming/enthusiast lineup below enterprise level pricing, not paying 3 times more to not get iGPU and fan/sink as I don't really need more cores, ecc or other xeon stuff.

Except, as has been said over and over and over again, your iGPU less chip would have to be a special design, and would cost way more money, because it would be a special run and not just another ordinary chip. An iGPU less chip cant be used in consumer system, and thus your CPU cannot be subsidized by the likes of OEMs. It's not like it hurts anything either, just pretend your chip doesnt have one. it doesnt pull power, affect OCing, ece.

Silicon is cheap, its the design that is expensive. Why so many people think that not having part of the chip would mean a cheap as chips super gaming CPU is beyond me, just being a "gaming/enthusianst" chip would double the price.

 

[dirtyferret]

It's a nice article but much of it is also wishful thinking. AMDs Ryzen CPUs have created competition in the core count realm and we the public have benefited but AMD still needs better IPC that just barely beats haswells and better penetration in the desktop consumer market. The former should come with time but the latter is a tall order when Intel has 80% of the market share and non-mobile CPUs is a shrinking market.

 

[Cycloid Torus]

Steve, thanks for the sunlight on this dark corner. Looking forward to more.

 

[Steve]

It's a nice article but much of it is also wishful thinking. AMDs Ryzen CPUs have created competition in the core count realm and we the public have benefited but AMD still needs better IPC that just barely beats haswells and better penetration in the desktop consumer market. The former should come with time but the latter is a tall order when Intel has 80% of the market share and non-mobile CPUs is a shrinking market.

Let's chat about what AMD needs to do this time next year, you might be shocked how this is going to play out in the relative short term.

 

[Mr Majestyk]

Great article and fantastic to see someone with the courage to call them out. I couldn't care less if Intel CPU's are better than AMD or not, I'm supporting AMD all the way and I hope more and more people see past a few fps in games to support a company that can give us real competition and send Intel a clear message, near enough is not good enough. Fat and lazy and dishonest.

 

[OcelotRex]

Drop the toothpaste
Peasants have overclocking rights
I like my motherboard, don’t make us breakup prematurely

These 3 would be the most welcome for system builders. If Intel proceeded down that course there would be little to differentiate themselves from AMD other than core count. I kind of fear what would happen to AMD's market share if Intel adopted your fixes Steve.

 

[dirtyferret]

Let's chat about what AMD needs to do this time next year, you might be shocked how this is going to play out in the relative short term.

It will be interesting and I agree with every one of your points I just believe from a business perspective Intel simply wants to increase revenue in order to beat market expectations and raise stock prices. So what a small segment of DIY builders say is of little interest to Intel. AMD does a better job of at least placating to the DIY crowd because it's an in for AMD's market penetration but if AMD reversed roles with Intel they would act exactly the same as Intel and Intel would act just like AMD. End of the day the only brand you should be loyal to is the one that gives you best value for your dollar because they all have no loyalty towards you.

 

[cliffordcooley]

Let's chat about what AMD needs to do this time next year, you might be shocked how this is going to play out in the relative short term.

At that time everyone will have forgotten about this article, and you will be labeled as an Intel Fanboy.

 

[Theinsanegamer]

Great article and fantastic to see someone with the courage to call them out. I couldn't care less if Intel CPU's are better than AMD or not, I'm supporting AMD all the way and I hope more and more people see past a few fps in games to support a company that can give us real competition and send Intel a clear message, near enough is not good enough. Fat and lazy and dishonest.

If near enough is not good enough, why on earth are you supporting AMD ryzen? "near enough" describes the platform to a T.

 

[texasrattler]

Let's chat about what AMD needs to do this time next year, you might be shocked how this is going to play out in the relative short term.

At that time everyone will have forgotten about this article, and you will be labeled as an Intel Fanboy.

Kinda hard to forget when all TS has to do is repost it to remind everyone. Did you forget this is the internet, nothing is ever really lost or forgotten.

 

[hay fizzy]

Great artical but the whilst AMD has made a mark in desktop it is still impossible to find a cheap ryzen laptop any where. What intel may do is lower prices where the is most competition and increase it else where. It would have been good to show the price a a very cheap heatsink that is better the the intel version.

 

[Fallere825]

It's not like it hurts anything either, just pretend your chip doesnt have one. it doesnt pull power, affect OCing, ece.

TLR: I'm pretty sure iGPUs hurt overcloking performance on haswell and earlier processors, tough I can't really point to a source from the top of my head



Please correct me if I'm wrong, but at least when I got my 5820k a few years back, the overcloking headroom for an 4700k (or 6700k, can't remember the exact timing when I read it) was only between 2-400mhz over "stock" boost speed before becoming unstable, while ivy-E/haswell-e could easily b overclocked by 1-1.2 ghz (arguably, they also started at much lower clockspeeds to begin with).
In the few articles I read, this often was explained by the non-E cpu having a iGPU, which limited overcloking potential.
Again, this is already 2-3 years in the past, and I only read 2-3 articles about it (since the price difference between 4700k and 5820k was only 50€, so it was not really a tough decision), I don't know if this might have changed with skylake/cabbylake etc.

 

[Boilerhog146]

I 100% agree with all your points steve,great article,may all of our wet dreams come true! :O

In retrospect.back in the core 2 duo and quad days ,I would replace the little HSF that was supplied ,with one from an older P4 Prescott or Pentium D style with the copper core ..which must be why they made newer versions hold down fittings just slightly further apart.forced to buy a new replacement,rather than reuse the older hardware that worked awesome,BTW.

 

[Valka]

As someone who was overclocking Celeron 266 CPUs (so as to afford a Voodoo, the original offloaded GPU platform on the PC) I'm glad AMD was able to stick it out. I've owned those too and I've seen the BS that happens when Intel has no competition. While slapping more cores onto a slow chip do virtually nothing for baseline performance I accept that if half of them are idle and your TDP is high you can make those specific cores go faster. You cannot infinitely split processes no matter what you're doing provided it's not some sort of weird math/research project. Also Intel has been proven to mark up/withhold tech for years so if you want better things vote for who will give you better things.

 

[Ben Myers]

It is absurd that Intel still ships the same cheap all-aluminum heat sink with its stock cooling fans. Yes, I know that Intel keeps trying to reduce the baseline TDP by lowering the CPU voltage. And this allows for higher clock speeds. Great.

Intel, can you spell C-O-P-P-E-R?

Fortunately, Intel has not changed the footprint for heat sink/cooling fans on its motherboards since the intro of the first LGA115x socket CPUs. So I have some quiet CoolerMaster copper core heat sink/cooling fans left over from some older lightly used industrial systems I tore down. They are perfect replacements on top of the newer Intel CPUs. cool and quiet.

 

[lazer]

First, I think Intel made a better product than AMD.
second, it wasn't that much better than AMD.

I have both Intel and AMD in my computer. I am into business and not games and need it for mostly docs and internet so super fast is not my need.

But Intel did better in convincing people that their product was soooooo much better than AMD that people were willing to plunk down the cash to get a chip that was a bit better for average needs.

that is my take.

 

[dj2017]

This article could be renamed in two ways

"Things we want Intel to do, but Intel will never do"

and

"Things we realize we want from Intel, now that AMD opened up our eyes"

 

[BadThad]

Great article! One important thing you missed....IPC. We need more efficient CPU's over sheer clockspeed increases. What we have today from Intel is the original 2006 Core processors with minor tweaks and die shrinks. Why no fresh design like AMD?

 

[SingularitE]

Great article! One important thing you missed....IPC. We need more efficient CPU's over sheer clockspeed increases. What we have today from Intel is the original 2006 Core processors with minor tweaks and die shrinks. Why no fresh design like AMD?

Sandy Bridge wasn't fresh enough?
Its true, since then there were only minor updates with features and clock speed BUT why fix something that is so good compared to anything?
Even AMD's new Zen arch is similar and I bet that back then, right after the Bulldozer fiasco, the CPU team's focus was the reverse engineering of Sandy Bridge.

 

[SingularitE]

It's a nice article but much of it is also wishful thinking. AMDs Ryzen CPUs have created competition in the core count realm and we the public have benefited but AMD still needs better IPC that just barely beats haswells and better penetration in the desktop consumer market. The former should come with time but the latter is a tall order when Intel has 80% of the market share and non-mobile CPUs is a shrinking market.

Let's chat about what AMD needs to do this time next year, you might be shocked how this is going to play out in the relative short term.

Why wait a year when you can do it next week?
AMD's PSP and the recent security holes that it features can be a fine addition to the list.

Speaking about the Elephant in the Room, IMO Intel's ME is mandatory for this list.
Why isn't IME opt-in (in UEFI) or even optional (in chipset/CPU) is truly devilish.
For all other nonessential features there can be market/price segmentation but this remote feature has to be present AND enabled AND active all the time? Why Intel, why?

BTW, great article.