Intel Skylake / Kaby Lake

[TheELF]

If you really want to understand how most people buy computers, just go to the computer section in one of the stores I mentioned above, and ask a sales rep to help you pick out a computer. Tell him/her what you want to use it for, how much you're willing to spend, etc. and watch the process unfold.

Better yet wait for some customers,being someone who has some grasp about PCs will skew the experiment.
(Also for Lols)

 

[VirtualLarry]

Consumers buy computers generally for the following reasons:

1. The one I have doesn't work well or it broke. I need a new one.
2. I, or the person for whom I am buying it, does not have a computer but wants/needs one.

Those people either go online (using old barely working computer or with their smartphone) and pick out a computer, or they go to Best Buy, Wal-Mart, Staples, or someplace like that and pick out a computer.

They don't know a thing about IPC, clock speed, or anything else. There is sometimes (often?) a helpful infographic in the computer section, almost certainly put there through some marketing agreement between the retailer and Intel, that explains in very simple terms what Celeron, Pentium, Core i3/i5/i7 are, and what you should buy based on your "use case" (these use cases are in very broad terms and would look silly to an enthusiast).

The potential buyer has a certain budget in mind, with perhaps a little bit of wiggle room. Then that person looks at the different computers within his or her price range, and either independently or with the help of a sales rep (who has just enough knowledge to explain in broad terms what the different features/options mean) picks a system that she or he thinks will meet their needs for a while.

That person walks out the door with her or his computer, and probably won't be back to buy another computer for a long time.

If you really want to understand how most people buy computers, just go to the computer section in one of the stores I mentioned above, and ask a sales rep to help you pick out a computer. Tell him/her what you want to use it for, how much you're willing to spend, etc. and watch the process unfold.

It's frustrating, but it's so true.

I had a friend of a friend buy a brand-new PC at BestBuy, for like $700 or $900 or something. It wasn't a bad PC, but like most OEM-built PCs (other than Microcenter's), it wasn't "well rounded". He bought it for gaming, and I think got an i7, but then was using it for gaming with the HD4600 iGPU. Gah! Who does serious online gaming, without a GPU?!?!. Anyways, he doesn't really talk to his friends after he got a GF, but I was going to offer him one of my older half-decent GPUs for free, for a Christmas present one year, just so that he could see what he was missing, and maybe buy an updated GPU in the future.

I've got another friend, whom I helped build (for a price) a PC, and then continued to soup it up (for him, and for me, to do DC for me one Winter season). He started with an AM2+ ASRock mobo, a low-power AM2 dual-core, 2x2GB DDR2-800, and onboard HD3000 chipset IGP video. Eventually, I helped him out with an Athlon II X4 CPU, some 4x4GB "Chinese DDR2" I picked up cheap on ebay, and a few SSDs (over the years), and a retail upgrade copy of Windows 7, because he had been on XP, with an old HDD.

It's far from a bad rig, with a quad-core, 16GB of RAM, and a 120GB SSD with Win7 64-bit. But he complains about it every once in a while, and I would like to throw in an Intel rig with higher IPC and clocks for him, if he could at least make some sort of token payment to defer some of my expenses on the parts. I was thinking, New Kaby Lake G4560 3.5Ghz w/HT, or G4600 3.6Ghz w/HT and HD630 (have one incoming), Asus H110M-A/M.2 (already have), 2x8GB DDR4-2400 (already have), and maybe a PCI-E M.2 SSD, if he's willing to spring for something that pricy. Otherwise, I would throw in a new 240GB 2.5" SATA SSD out of my SSD stockpiles. (Don't have any spare new larger ones.) Then, either transfer the Win7 64-bit license over, or possibly install Win10 64-bit, and use the Win7 license key to activate on new hardware. (Probably the best choice.)

But part of me, wonders if maybe he shouldn't just go out and buy a Skylake / Kaby Lake i3 pre-built, and be done with it.

 

[DrMrLordX]

Consumers and businesses by and large don't buy processors. They buy computers.

"Those people" aren't the target market for chips like the i7-6700k or i7-7700k, though, unless they're boutique buyers, gamers, or professionals that really need the extra grunt. Those people do watch for specs, especially if it's something a sales guy can use to close a deal.

"6 cores! 2 more than last gen!" etc. The buyer (save the pro) won't think about how that will help them, they'll just get it because it's a new shiny. Pros will get it if they think their app can make use of the extra thread parallelism. Gamers are kind of a mixed bag, but judging by the slew of gamer hardware out there, selling them superfluous gear based on specs and bling can be a winning strategy.

Intel doesn't want to move 6 cores on the mainstream desktop so that they can continue to rack up high(er) margins from HEDT sales. They have to balance out their continued need to sell quads for ~$350 on the mainstream socket vs. the market's disillusionment with said quads. Intel can only sell "the same thing" (as far as the market is concerned) over and over so many times before sales start to slip, or until they give a competitor a chance to sell something better at a similar price.

And really, do you think you'll see average Joes complaining here - or anywhere else - about an endless parade of 4c/8t CPUs from Intel? They won't complain anywhere, they'll just stay on Haswell/Ivy/Sandy/whatever else they have until Intel offers something more compelling. We talk with our keyboards around here, they just speak with their wallets.

 

[Arachnotronic]

"Those people" aren't the target market for chips like the i7-6700k or i7-7700k, though, unless they're boutique buyers, gamers, or professionals that really need the extra grunt. Those people do watch for specs, especially if it's something a sales guy can use to close a deal.

There is a spectrum of "gamers." There are the gamers that just want to play their favorite games and only know just enough about hardware so that they can make sure to buy decent stuff, and then there are gamers that also happen to be hardware aficionados.

The former group is perhaps a step above your average Joe, though the latter are quite sophisticated.

"6 cores! 2 more than last gen!" etc. The buyer (save the pro) won't think about how that will help them, they'll just get it because it's a new shiny. Pros will get it if they think their app can make use of the extra thread parallelism. Gamers are kind of a mixed bag, but judging by the slew of gamer hardware out there, selling them superfluous gear based on specs and bling can be a winning strategy.

I don't think most gamers know how many cores their CPUs have. I have built dozens of systems for gamers (people who play games far more than I do), and they don't have a clue about any of that stuff, and if they do, it's only because I was eager to tell them what they were spending their money on because I'm just like that.

Intel doesn't want to move 6 cores on the mainstream desktop so that they can continue to rack up high(er) margins from HEDT sales. They have to balance out their continued need to sell quads for ~$350 on the mainstream socket vs. the market's disillusionment with said quads. Intel can only sell "the same thing" (as far as the market is concerned) over and over so many times before sales start to slip, or until they give a competitor a chance to sell something better at a similar price.

If that were the reason (I doubt it), why wouldn't Intel just charge a little more for the mainstream hex core to make sure that it did not hurt margins? ;-)

And really, do you think you'll see average Joes complaining here - or anywhere else - about an endless parade of 4c/8t CPUs from Intel? They won't complain anywhere, they'll just stay on Haswell/Ivy/Sandy/whatever else they have until Intel offers something more compelling. We talk with our keyboards around here, they just speak with their wallets.

Have you built systems for these average Joes? I have, and they don't upgrade out of "want" but out of "need."

"This game doesn't run well" or "I want a gaming computer so I can start buying and playing games from Steam."

They will come to me, tell me they have X thousand(s) of dollars to spend, and ask me for help in picking out the parts. Normally they don't even care what parts I pick out, but I like to try to jazz them up about what they're getting.

Of course, they get really jazzed up when they fire up their computers and play games that their previous computers could only dream of running. They don't care how many cores the chip has, what frequency it runs at, or who makes the parts -- they're just super happy that they can do what they want to do.

This doesn't apply to all buyers, but I'd say it applies to an extremely large portion of buyers, even within the "gaming" market.

Within the true "enthusiast" market (i.e. people like us chatting about this stuff on message boards), people do seem to be getting bored of mainstream quads.

 

[CHADBOGA]

Then 7nm era, you go to CanonLake (or what ever) with a 15-20% IPC boost in late 2019 (you have 3-4 years to increase IPC)

I don't think we are going to get a 15 - 20% IPC boost in 3 to 4 yrs from now, all the low fruit hanging fruit is gone.

This will dawn on people once they see how little IPC improvement Zen+ makes over Zen.

It is easy to get big IPC improvements if the previous generation was borked, but not so easy if the previous generation was pretty good.

 

[Arachnotronic]

I don't think we are going to get a 15 - 20% IPC boost in 3 to 4 yrs from now, all the low fruit hanging fruit is gone.

This will dawn on people once they see how little IPC improvement Zen+ makes over Zen.

It is easy to get big IPC improvements if the previous generation was borked, but not so easy if the previous generation was pretty good.

I think we'll see a good boost from Ice Lake in 2018. Could be about 15%.

 

[VirtualLarry]

I think we'll see a good boost from Ice Lake in 2018. Could be about 15%.

I'm very doubtful of that, but I remain ever optimistic at CPU design and process engineers. They seem to be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat every time they need to. (Well, Bulldozer excepted, I guess.)

 

[Arachnotronic]

I'm very doubtful of that, but I remain ever optimistic at CPU design and process engineers. They seem to be able to pull a rabbit out of the hat every time they need to. (Well, Bulldozer excepted, I guess.)

IMO, Ice is going to have to last them three generations (Ice, Tiger, and the first 7nm-lake), so they'd better bring the goods, especially since they've had more time to work on it than they normally would for a "tock."

But obviously this is just a guess, I'm clearly not stating this as a hard fact or anything.

 

[DrMrLordX]

I don't think most gamers know how many cores their CPUs have.

PC Gamers probably do, console gamers probably not. Or they might have a number in their heads that is inaccurate, kind of like some techs I knew back in the K7 days that thought their Athlons had 384k l2.

Regardless Intel could market the hell out of it and get beaucoup sales doing so. First ever consumer CPU with 6 cores! Buy yours today!

Remember how they marketed Core 2? Wash, rinse, repeat.

If that were the reason (I doubt it), why wouldn't Intel just charge a little more for the mainstream hex core to make sure that it did not hurt margins? ;-)

Ask Intel? My guess is that it's cheaper/easier for them to push Xeons in a consumer package on the HEDT lineup than it is for them to make an entirely different die for the consumer platform.

I have, and they don't upgrade out of "want" but out of "need."

"This game doesn't run well" or "I want a gaming computer so I can start buying and playing games from Steam."

That was sort of my point. People who already have a 4c/8t i7 have few compelling reasons to get anything better since they don't really need it. That's certainly true of anyone on Haswell or Skylake. Many Haswell owners - even the lower-tech types - would happily have upgraded to Skylake or Kabylake if Intel had pushed the idea on them that they needed +50% cores.

 

[CHADBOGA]

I think we'll see a good boost from Ice Lake in 2018. Could be about 15%.

Obviously I hope for the biggest increase possible, but unless they bring in some eDram like the 5775c Broadwells, I'm struggling to see how they are all of a sudden going to do better than efforts in recent years .

#Edit - Actually I guess if they reverse their current policy of design improvements having to also deliver power efficiency improvements and just let an improved process do most of the work for lowering power usage, then I could see how they would manage a decent improvement in IPC beyond what we have seen in recent years.

 

[Arachnotronic]

#Edit - Actually I guess if they reverse their current policy of design improvements having to also deliver power efficiency improvements and just let an improved process do most of the work for lowering power usage, then I could see how they would manage a decent improvement in IPC beyond what we have seen in recent years.

Yeah, that's the "catch."

However, I do take issue with Intel's current policy of "optimize the process/circuit design to give you more frequency" when I look at it from an enthusiast perspective. It does allow them to do better products, so it's clearly better than the previous policy ("oh, our new process is broken? Overclock the 4770K, make no silicon changes, and release the 4790K"), but I would like to see more.

Intel would have really impressed me if Kaby Lake had been what Cannon Lake-DT was supposed to be, but built in the shiny new 14nm+, and then if Coffee Lake was a port of the Ice Lake RTL to 14nm++ or whatever they market it as.

But sadly, I suspect that they weren't counting on 10nm to be in the broken, sorry state that it's in, so they couldn't take the risk of both making significant changes to the 14nm process and mucking too much with the architecture.

If they had more time, they could have done both. I think for the 10nm generation they have accepted the hard reality that they won't be getting to 7nm anytime soon, so more time to plan more substantive architecture changes along with, perhaps, bigger jumps in transistor performance.

Whether they bundle all of those architectural goodies for one big jump (more time to work on it) and then they optimize to wring out more frequency/add cores/etc. or they dribble them out over three generations, I don't know. But I do think Intel will be under pressure to keep pushing performance, those smartphones are getting mighty fast...

 

[VirtualLarry]

But I do think Intel will be under pressure to keep pushing performance, those smartphones are getting mighty fast...

Not to mention, those ARM-based phones, could end up running Windows.

 

[StrangerGuy]

That was sort of my point. People who already have a 4c/8t i7 have few compelling reasons to get anything better since they don't really need it. That's certainly true of anyone on Haswell or Skylake. Many Haswell owners - even the lower-tech types - would happily have upgraded to Skylake or Kabylake if Intel had pushed the idea on them that they needed +50% cores.

Enthusiasts are so bored out their minds these days that they want any excuse, no matter how trivial, to start spending on CPUs again.

 

[CHADBOGA]

Enthusiasts are so bored out their minds these days that they want any excuse, no matter how trivial, to start spending on CPUs again.

The sort of excuse to spend more on a CPU would be if something like Half Life 3 came out, it was a masterpiece and needed more CPU power than usual to run it.

Unfortunately it seems only the graphics processing demands become significantly more demanding every year or two with various games.

 

[Arachnotronic]

The sort of excuse to spend more on a CPU would be if something like Half Life 3 came out, it was a masterpiece and needed more CPU power than usual to run it.

Unfortunately it seems only the graphics processing demands become significantly more demanding every year or two with various games.

Basically, buy the best CPU that you can, use it until your platform gets too old to do what you want, replace CPU and mobo with new ones. Rinse and repeat.

 

[Arachnotronic]

Enthusiasts are so bored out their minds these days that they want any excuse, no matter how trivial, to start spending on CPUs again.

Intel Gimpeon Technology -- a new technology that will permanently decrease the multiplier of your CPU at a variable rate of 1-3x every six months. You will have a legitimate excuse to buy a new CPU within two years -- just show your wife how slow your games have gotten.

Keep your CPU long enough, and even web surfing will become a chore.

Look for the Intel Gimpeon sticker on select personal computers (just kidding -- all of them! We really need to sell more processors, people!)

 

[CHADBOGA]

Basically, buy the best CPU that you can, use it until your platform gets too old to do what you want, replace CPU and mobo with new ones. Rinse and repeat.

Yep.

I remember spending a small fortune back in the day on a 486DX-2 and within 18 months when Windows 95 came out, my computer was near useless running it.

Now we have the incredible situation where the biggest resource hog of a Microsoft Desktop Operating System is Vista.

 

[StrangerGuy]

Yep.

I remember spending a small fortune back in the day on a 486DX-2 and within 18 months when Windows 95 came out, my computer was near useless running it.

Now we have the incredible situation where the biggest resource hog of a Microsoft Desktop Operating System is Vista.

Now I have a nearly 9-year $25 E5450 sitting in my cupboard that still can run Doom 4 pretty well enough.

 

[Shmee]

Does Kabylake support blck OC? How is it on these chips/Z270 mobos?

 

[Shmee]

After a bit of googling, it appears that most Z170 bios that supports Kaby took out BCLK OC. Shame. However, I see ASrock has Z270 motherboards which claim to support a version 2 of their BCLK OC feature. This will have to be looked into further.

 

[StrangerGuy]

After a bit of googling, it appears that most Z170 bios that supports Kaby took out BCLK OC. Shame. However, I see ASrock has Z270 motherboards which claim to support a version 2 of their BCLK OC feature. This will have to be looked into further.

Still looking for that free lunch from Intel in 2017? I gave up long ago.

 

[Sweepr]

Eurogamer's Intel Kaby Lake: Core i7 7700K review

To keep the table 'tidy', we've restricted ourselves to overclocked results - and you can see stock performance of the i5s and i7s we've tested right here. There are two big takeaways from our tests here. Firstly, the Core i5 7600K is fast, but the 7700K is positively stratospheric. Every title bar The Division (the benchmark is GPU-limited - even with Titan X Pascal) and Far Cry Primal (reliant on single-thread performance) sees an uptick in performance of anything up to 35 per cent. Game engines have migrated to many-core designs, and the i7 is well-equipped to take care of this.

The bottom line is this - outside of extremely poor optimisation, it takes something truly exceptional for a modern Core i5 K chip not to be able to run gameplay at a consistent 60fps (Crysis 3's jungle on very high will do it though - even on a 7600K clocked at 4.8GHz). In those scenarios, a Core i7 is required. And there are plenty of other use-case scenarios for an i7 too. If you're looking to move beyond 60fps - gaming on a high refresh rate monitor, for example - the fastest i7 you can afford is the way forward.

Moore's Law is slowing down, process shrinks are behind schedule and Intel's tick-tock model is now a thing of the past. Kaby Lake sits on a 14nm process and it seems likely that its desktop successor - Coffee Lake - will too. Intel has a strategy in place for future mainstream i7s that looks set to involve six core CPUs, but the benefits there in gaming have yet to be fully established...

It's also worth pointing out that the processor and gaming performance alone isn't the sole reason for potentially upgrading. Advancements in processor performance may be moribund but there are some exciting developments in solid-state storage technology - and while a decent SATA-3 connection combined with a decent SSD can massively reduce loading times, we're eager to see the next-gen solid-state formats in action. Similarly, new USB 3.1 and Thunderbolt 3 support may prove compelling in the fullness of time.

The most interesting part are the DDR4 memory scaling results. Stock Core i7-7700K paired with DDR4-2400+ is faster than 4.8 GHz Core i7-7700K with DDR4-2133! Choose your memory kit wisely.

www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-2017-intel-kaby-lake-core-i7-7700k-review

 

[StrangerGuy]

So is that "i7 is useless for gaming" meme finally dead yet?

 

[CakeMonster]

Nope, you'll probably still have people in 2020 claiming that their 2500K can do EVERYTHING.

 

[Conroe]

Does Kabylake support blck OC? How is it on these chips/Z270 mobos?

On my Asus Strix Z270G the BCLC has settings from 40 to 650 mhz. With my i5 6500 I can only raise it to 102.9. 103 will not post. Maybe Asrock did better than Asus.