"Sandy bridge, Ivy bridge, Haswell and the mess of Intel processors feature list"

[turn_pike]

Found an interesting article (ilsistemista.net) while browsing hacker news this morning. It talks about how Intel may have gone too far with its differentiation / market segmentation tactic that it can cause confusion for the consumer. As an example the author points out that i5-2400 has TXT and VT-d while the higher priced i7-2600k does not (same thing in Ivy Bridge and Haswell).


gratis bilder

 

[OlyAR15]

So what?

 

[jpiniero]

Lame article, esp since it is 4 pages for no good reason other than page views.

I had always kind of assumed that Intel had disabled some features on the K models because there were bugs or they hadn't properly validated that it would work while overclocking (and except for the 4790K I would have to presume that virtually all K models were overclocked at some point)

 

[Maximilian]

TSX is busted on all chips anyway isnt it?

 

[turn_pike]

So what?

Because I, for one, had assumed that the higher Intel cpu series would have all the features of the cheaper cpu and I think many people would think the same. This is another example of a monopoly forcing a market segmentation to gain optimal profit.

 

[Jovec]

IT guy: we need to buy this XEON server.
Half-assed tech manager: Just buy a $300 4770k and OC that to 5GHz! We'll save tons!

 

[TheELF]

This is another example of a monopoly forcing a market segmentation to gain optimal profit.

Monopoly has nothing to do with it,just look at the VGA market and the numbers they have,no chance for the average joe to figure out whats what.

 

[Puppies04]

Because I, for one, had assumed that the higher Intel cpu series would have all the features of the cheaper cpu and I think many people would think the same. This is another example of a monopoly forcing a market segmentation to gain optimal profit.

"K" CPUs are squarely aimed at gamers. Anyone running "real" workloads isn't going to risk data corruption by overclocking outside intels parameters. So when you say "Higher" intel CPUs what do you mean exactly because if you are judging them on price there are other factors than feature sets which can make them more expensive.

 

[Ken g6]

To see a similar adoption for AVX code, the number of AVX processors need to dramatically increase. Any segmentation done at AVX level will badly fragment the market, leading to no AVX use in consumer programs and a stagnation of the software ecosystem around older SIMD instructions.

From my point of view as a developer, this is the biggest problem. If a majority of chips don't support an instruction set, a majority of developers will see no reason to support that instruction set. Thus it will be useless in a majority of cases, and a majority of people won't bother buying the more expensive chips.

I wonder why Intel doesn't continue its i7-i5-i3 differentiation down the line to Pentium and Celeron:

i7: 4-core, HT
i5: 4-core, no HT
i3: 2-core, HT
Pentium: 2-core, no HT
Hence, Celeron should be 1-core, HT. Shouldn't it?

Oh, one more thing: the industry is bored by ISA wars. SSSE3, SSE4.1, SSE4.2, SSE4A, XOP, AVX, FMA3, FMA4, AVX2... stop here. AMD, Intel: please, please, please design a future-looking, forward-compatible instruction set and enable it, with different performance target, on yours entire CPU line.

Actually, this is another good idea for a differentiation. There should be a code returned when querying processor properties that describes how wide AVX and AVX2 are. 4 would be 2^4 bytes, 128 bits, the same as SSE except for having more instructions available. (Hey! Something to convince people to upgrade their Pentiums!) 5 would be AVX, 6 would be AVX-512, etc.

And they might be able to extend this even further, with a high-latency level that runs extremely wide AVX instructions on the iGPU. Something to segment iGPUs as well!

 

[master_shake_]

why does a 4790k need vtd-io?

oh well looks like i found my new esxi cpu.

weird that a 4770k doesn't have it.

 

[tential]

So what?

This.
The average consumer couldn't care less what any of those things you listed in that graph are. The fact that their processor doesn't support virtualization means nothing to them.

To the consumer that does care, I'm sure they can read a spec sheet....

 

[NTMBK]

I wonder why Intel doesn't continue its i7-i5-i3 differentiation down the line to Pentium and Celeron:

i7: 4-core, HT
i5: 4-core, no HT
i3: 2-core, HT
Pentium: 2-core, no HT
Hence, Celeron should be 1-core, HT. Shouldn't it?

To be fair, most Celeron and Pentiums these days are Bay Trail garbage.