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I noticed intel have made lower end chips for 8th gen

ExoMale

ExoMale

ExoMale

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bit strange they would make the i3 a quad and proceed with the 6 cores chips then after a few months decide to make the pentiums and celerons? Surely with the non K i3 being a bit under £100 the dual cores would seem like a waste of time? It made sense with skylake/kabylake with how much the i3 models were retailing at for near identical performance(minus celeron obviously), but for new gen it just doesn’t seem sense unless I’m thinking wrong behind why they would continue to carry them on?.


Don’t know how long they been showing on the list, but haven’t seen anyone put up a discussion about them.
 
I think you could actually argue that they make more sense this time around. Before, the only major difference between the Pentium and Core i3 was cache size (or not, in the case of the Core i3-7100) and GPU. Now, it's more clear:

Celeron = 2c/2t (hasn't changed since 1st generation)
Pentium = 2c/4t (since 7th generation)
Core i3 = 4t/4t (since 8th generation)
Core i5 = 6c/6t (since 8th generation)
Core i7 = 6c/12t (since 8th generation)

AMD's cheapest Ryzen APU is essentially competing against the Core i3-8100. Both are 4c/4t, within 100 MHz of each other, but the Ryzen is overclockable, a bit cheaper and has a far superior GPU. Sounds like an easy win, however AMD have nothing new below that price point right now so they lose a chunk of market share (they only have older Athlons based on Bulldozer derivatives which are really not competitive at all). I wonder if Intel actually makes anything on Celerons and Pentiums or just uses them as loss leaders?
 
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By the time you take out Intel's shipping costs, retailers and suppliers margins there isn't much money to Intel on £40 - £50 CPU's, a wild guess maybe £15 to £20? But because they cost nothing a lot of people buy them, i don't think Intel are losing any money on them but i also don't think they are making any, they keep up Intel's market share, so Intel can say "we are the market leaders" that in PR is worth more than selling fewer for more money but making a profit off them.
 
I see where your coming from, still don’t think they would appeal much unless someone only had like £100-150, but then unless you need need a pc, you can buy laptops whether they celeron duals or better for that sort of money with 500-1tb hard drives that would do the job if all you want is general use, but I suppose it makes sense in the ‘keep the trend’ sort of way going from low to high end rather than start like mid for a quad i3 to high end as they did with the 8th gen.

I guess it’s only a matter of time before intel finally make the celerons dual cores useful with hyper threading applied and the pentiums to go to quads if they would ever do such a thing.
 
I don't know about this particular case, but sometimes lower end chips are just higher end chips with defects. E.g. quad core with a defective core, tweaked to run as dual core, or half the cache disabled because of some defect in the other half, or maybe they'll only run stable at very low speeds. This way they can make a little money out of them and grab low end market share, rather than just throwing the defective chips in the bin.
 
Not sure why it's such a surprise - as above Manufacturers will always seek to recoup some cost from failed wafers in order to improve yield early in a Fab Process' lifecycle when there may be issues.

Additional, despite the fact that they are "only dual cores", for general web browsing and typical office tasks like email and word processing they are still more than adequate.

Kind of representative how little progress have made in recent times (due to lack of competition from AMD), compared to your 8 year old i3-540 for example:
https://www.cpubenchmark.net/compare/Intel-Celeron-G4900T-vs-Intel-i3-540/3214vs738
 
mrbazmondo said:
I don't know about this particular case, but sometimes lower end chips are just higher end chips with defects. E.g. quad core with a defective core, tweaked to run as dual core, or half the cache disabled because of some defect in the other half, or maybe they'll only run stable at very low speeds. This way they can make a little money out of them and grab low end market share, rather than just throwing the defective chips in the bin.
Click to expand...

^This.

Why bin the defective IC when you can just gimp it and still make a few bucks off it?
This is why low end chips exist for the most part IMO. Especially given the lineup right now.

I think anybody who buys the 2 core parts at this point is crazy.
 
I still think the latest Pentium G4560 is a steal at under £50, it's only 54w and runs at 3.5 Ghz stock which is plenty of single thread performance for the money
 
My work development machine is a 2c with HT and it's more than ample... People waaay overestimate what's needed for a lot of tasks. Yes, there are plenty tasks that need better CPUs but the vast majority of home computing doesn't stretch these Pentiums.
 
If you look at the bottom end of the new chips (price wise) they offer two chips which are identical except one is 200/100 mhz faster than the other at £40 and £50 . Now charging 20% extra for 2 or 3 percent more perf seems criminal.
g4920 vs g4900. I like the look of the i5 8400t ( vs r5 1600 35w part mia )
 
An 11 year old q6600 is easily enough for most office work when paired with an SSD. Most people I know that buy laptops get a new one either because the HDD is slow and don't know that they could have bought an SSD instead, or just want a new plastic exterior to look at thats a bit thinner, oblivious to the fact the processor is sometimes slower than their old one.
 
mrbazmondo said:
An 11 year old q6600 is easily enough for most office work when paired with an SSD. Most people I know that buy laptops get a new one either because the HDD is slow and don't know that they could have bought an SSD instead, or just want a new plastic exterior to look at thats a bit thinner, oblivious to the fact the processor is sometimes slower than their old one.
Click to expand...

Combined with a 7870 as well, its enough to play many games like Rocket League, Elite Dangerous and Fortnite. I know because I have one!
 
they have their use cases, i used a Pentium G4400 (7th gen) for £40 to upgrade a machine for someone plodding along on an old core2duo for web browsing, mobo/cpu/ram was £150 if ddr4 had sane pricing it would've been even less and it flys compared to the core2
 
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