Who would prefer an Intel 3 core with HT over current i5's?

[Yuriman]

Though it would be very slightly slower in multithreaded loads, I think I would prefer an i7 with one core disabled to having hyperthreading disabled. 3 strong cores and the ability to run 6 threads sounds about right to me. Intel could probably salvage more dud i7's this way too, resulting in either higher margins or lower prices for us.

How does everyone else feel? Are 4 strong cores preferable to 3 strong cores + HT?

 

[ShintaiDK]

4 real cores.

 

[john5220]

But whats the price for 4 real cores? and would they even sell 3 cores to cut into their profits on i5?

A 3.7 GHZ haswell i3 is around $150~ and would be about as good as a 3GHZ core i5 haswell for $183
Heck a $109 3.5 GHZ i3 plays all multi player games at full 60 fps. So how much are they going to sell 3 cores?

Except the i3 would be better because of 3.7ghz single threaded performance. And then games like Battlefield 4 and 3 does not really care if its a real core, it just wants something to process the physics or whatever.

Lets say you played a game like Starcraft 2 or Diablo 3. They only support 2 cores and the 3.7 ghz i3 is faster than say a 3.4ghz i7

I honestly prefer the fastest i3 than the slowest i5 simply because both i3 and i5 does have 4 cores and the likes of battlefield 4 does not care if its real or virtual. Infact BF4 prefers higher clock i3 than a lower clock i5, it just needs 2 more cores to do something I have no idea what it wants it to do but whatever it does, 2 virtual cores shoots the fps to over 60 and a a 3.7 GHZ i3 for some reason can then beat a 3GHZ i5

 

[john5220]

Here is a question say a 5GHZ pentium G was possible a haswell or broadwell

would you prefer that with expensive mainboard and cooler or a cheap $189 3GHZ i5?

have a look at this

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lUlS5Q7tEJI

BF4 a unlocked OC Pentium vs a i7 4790k in BF4 a game that supports up to 8 threads. LOL the Pentium is almost equal in FPS performance

Here is a next one with the unlocked pentium G @4.4ghz playing BF4 but this time in a 64 player map

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YHImH0VQYZ8

Scores really high about a low end i5

 

[SAAA]

I would easily prefer the 3 core + HT if it's also clocked higher, this for locked chips but if unlocked it's harder to say.
Remember that for dual cores the i3 usually are better or similar to much faster Pentiums at +1GHz and many programs benefit from HT if they can use more threads.

It's nothing to laugh at nowadays, like +30% in some tasks even for i7 vs i5 chips so the same will happen to a 3 core: about identical performance to a 4 core but 2 more threads! It could be even better if this hypotetical CPU was clocked higher, like 3.5 vs 3GHz for cheaper i5s.

 

[cbn]

Though it would be very slightly slower in multithreaded loads, I think I would prefer an i7 with one core disabled to having hyperthreading disabled. 3 strong cores and the ability to run 6 threads sounds about right to me. Intel could probably salvage more dud i7's this way too, resulting in either higher margins or lower prices for us.

How does everyone else feel? Are 4 strong cores preferable to 3 strong cores + HT?

I would even take a triple core without HT.

 

[john5220]

^ I am curious would you would take a 3 core instead of a dual core with HT

 

[crashtech]

Clock for clock, 4 cores would be better, but not decisively so, I would think. But there's no place in the current lineup for such an animal. A more interesting and doable option would be to sell an i3-4390K. Even that would give low-end i5s some serious trouble in many scenarios.

 

[SAAA]

It should be easy to test this for anyone with an i7 and some time: just bench something with HT off, then HT on and 1 core disabled.
Also possibly try games and different clockspeeds. all for the benefit of humanity of course!

Also a 3 plain core would be nice, much better than any dual+HT in virtually any condition unless the code really requires 4 thread for some obscure reason...

 

[cbn]

^ I am curious would you would take a 3 core instead of a dual core with HT

It should be faster assuming HT scales 35% of a real core. (ie, dual core with HT= 2.7 Cores)

 

[BSim500]

Depends on a lot of things, price, clock speed, etc. An i3 with GT2 iGPU already uses almost as much silicon than an iGPU-less quad-core would let alone a tri-core, so if AMD became really competitive (in terms of IPC) and Intel wanted to boot out a "more core" budget chip they could easily produce a quad-core iGPU less chip (like the old i5-3350P Ivy Bridge) aimed at budget gamers for almost the same die-per-wafer cost as i3's. As for theoretical tri-core performance, all else being equal, Hyper-threading at its best often adds 15-25% or so, ie, i3 = 2.3-2.5x cores, i7 = 4.6-5.0x cores (though obviously various from one app/game to another - sometimes lower under 10%, sometimes higher above 30%). A tri-core (i4?) + HT would probably be equivalent to 3.5-3.75x cores. Theoretical TDP would probably be around 65w.

Overall, I see more value in Intel squeezing many more "P" quad-core dies onto a wafer than designing a tri-core. Another cheaper option to boost low-end is what crashtech said - a i3-"K" chip (though with typical OC's of 4.4-4.5Ghz, would only add around 15-20% over the current top i3-4370 (3.8GHz stock). It's a better choice than a Pentium "K" though really i3's would have benefited far more from an unlocked "K" variant back when Intel was nerfing their clock rates to 3.4Ghz and below. These days the "top i3 stock" vs "top i5 2T Turbo Boost" 400MHz disparity has typically shrunk to just 100Mhz and another core would be more "TDP efficient" than OCing dual-core and stuffing ever increasing iGPU's on every chip (which are wasted on both discrete gamers + non gamers alike).

 

[cbn]

Overall, I see more value in Intel squeezing many more "P" quad-core dies onto a wafer than designing a tri-core.

The Tri-core would likely be just a die harvested part.

And those iGPU less "P" quad cores were just regular quad core dies with the iGPU disabled.

 

[Cerb]

Though it would be very slightly slower in multithreaded loads, I think I would prefer an i7 with one core disabled to having hyperthreading disabled. 3 strong cores and the ability to run 6 threads sounds about right to me. Intel could probably salvage more dud i7's this way too, resulting in either higher margins or lower prices for us.

I suspect that if that were a cost-effective thing to do, we would have salvaged i3s, already (but no price changes). They probably do salvage chips here and there, and use them for OEMs, though, as duallies.

How does everyone else feel? Are 4 strong cores preferable to 3 strong cores + HT?

Wouldn't really care, TBH. Intel isn't going to give price breaks without much stronger competition, and both the fast i3s (4160, 4170) and the slow quads (4440, 4460) fill the price gap.

 

[Lepton87]

A 3 Core with HT would be worse overall than a 4 core in most things but it would be a close match, assuming the same clocks. An average performance gain of HT is 30% at most so 3x1.3=3.9X and it would need 6 threads to achieve similar performance to the quad core that would work at full throughput with 4 threads. Of course there are cases where HT gives way more than 30% and cases where it offers nothing, so those CPUs would trade blows. Interestingly Intel offers budget Hexcores without HT instead of 4c/8t for 2011-3 platform.

 

[Yuriman]

... which suggests to me that either Intel doesn't like harvesting dies, or they don't have to.

 

[Cerb]

Celerons and Pentiums are good places for salvaged 2C dies to go, but since they specify the core on most 4C+ models, I'm not sure what they do for bum 4C CPUs. It seems like a wast to throw them away. Maybe some becomes oddball OEM-only CPUs, like Xeons for blade servers and embedded devices.

 

[cbn]

... which suggests to me that either Intel doesn't like harvesting dies, or they don't have to.

With the die having the northbridge integrated (and the iGPU ever increasing in size) the chances of a defect occurring on one cpu core is pretty small I'd imagine.