You don't plan for vaporware years in advance, but you do plan for contingencies years in advance, if that means stacking up weird product lines (according to you) so be it. For me KBL was always plan A, remember AMD were targeting 40% IPC over Excavator but clearly exceeded that. So, Intel must've planned something that could probably match or exceed a 60% IPC, worst case scenario for them, hence KBL-X. Now you can pretend that KBL-X & 18 core Xeon turned SKL-X were always in the pipeline but not many will buy that.The funny thing is that the 7700K was released in what, January? Ryzen was released in what, February or March? If Intel had all this advanced intelligence years in advance, they knew when Ryzen was likely releasing - AMD, AFAIK, was always targeting fall of 2016. If Intel had been sandbagging all these years but yet had this incredible intelligence on Ryzen's performance and were scared, why wasn't the 7700K a larger leap in performance? As you mention above, we've largely since single digit increases since Sandy Bridge with maybe the exception of Ivy --> Haswell.
They won't, not across the board & certainly not without stock clocks going up. That's the biggest ST gain since SB, ain't happening with a marginal cache restructuring.As to Coffee Lake's performance and "tweaking" the cores, preliminary leaks indicate we may see a 10-11% boost in ST performance. Much of that is likely due to cache changes, but that's still a nice performance. Remember, you guys are missing the fact that Intel's original roadmap from YEARS ago had Cannonlake arriving late last year or early this year and it had more than 4 cores.
Yes & no one said Intel had the final Zen silicon in it's hand did they? But there are other ways to get info & you don't have to go full flame mode just to get a hint of your competitor's offering.Why would they? Socket 1151 was also designed years ago. Intel never intended to release Coffee Lake and maybe not even Kaby Lake, because they were fully focused on Cannonlake. When they ran into process issues they had to keep working on those while doing a product refresh, which turned out to be KBL/CFL. I suspect CFL isn't a direct insert into today's boards because of VRM specs but I don't know for sure. Intel had several versions of socket 2011 as well, so this is along those same lines.
Sure why not, a vaporware 18 core (it is till the time it's released) & desktop CFL models that may sell by the end of fall?It was a "rush" job only in the sense that Cannonlake was cancelled on the desktop and Intel had to do another product release to satisfy shareholders, keep sales going, etc. It was not a response to AMD other than them changing the release date.
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