When will i7's and DDR3 be more affordable?

[Perfect_Chaos]

I'm sure there is someone here that has a good idea when the prices are at the stage where they dont drop much afterward, or should i say a sweet spot.

Anyone?

 

[rypt]

6-9 months imo, unless Deneb is REALLY special

 

[Gazb]

As said above Deneb is the only possible reason for them to drop in price anytime soon otherwise the i7 will stay expensive until the mainstream version is released (Lynnfield) which has dual channel DDR3 and the lower pin count socket and will use the P55 chipset.

 

[drunkenmaster]

the top end i7's won't get hugely cheaper, big die huge pin out and motherboards with traces for triple channel and 6 slots, the boards are expensive. Think the 280gtx not getting hugely cheaper even on a smaller process simply because the pcb is 12 layer i think, as opposed to a normal 6/8 layer due to the 512mbit bus and mem size. Intricate boards cost a lot more to make and need higher quality parts. The boards probably won't get hugely cheaper.

The midrange should be much cheaper, but largely because 4gigs will be fine, while you really need 6gigs in a triple channel setup. The chips should start slower but probably won't be "that" much cheaper, its the £130 on the mobo and £70 on memory that will make the midrange more affordable. Phenom 2 has a real chance to beat the midrange because I7 is built for multithreaded performance and uber bandwidth and the huge numbers in encoding might come down significantly with only dual channel memory. Again we'll have to see. Gaming performance should be all but identical though and most use will be the same, only hugely intensive things will remotely care.


AMD might be the way to go this time but what they really need to do is make the range multiplier unlocked. As of Deneb's release it will be AM2+ only, the AM3+ chips a month/two later along with ddr3 boards. The problem is only the top end chip will be multi unlocked and AFAIK fsb clocking is limited with phenoms though might be fixed with the p2 chips.

To really grab the market a AM3 Deneb in feb/march, at £115 thats able to overclock to similar speeds to the £230 chip will be the way to get sales back in the value segment. If everyone on this forum has to buy a £230 AMD to overclock well, or a Q6600 for £100 less you can be sure what the majority will buy. if AMD can get a lower end multi unlocked chip, they'll be onto a winner. If they can do that, Intel will have to lower prices a lot.

i suspect that their midrange will be dropped to inline with AMD, but the top end ones won't as benchmarks, encoding and a few other things will show a significant lead and Intel wants to make the cash on those chips.

 

[Perfect_Chaos]

I found a new article stating that AMD's new CPU's are between 20 and 40 percent quicker than the old ones, is that enough to keep up with intel?

 

[embalse]

I'm hoping that with DDR3 Memory there will have more choice and it will be cheaper soon, but I fear it's wishful thinking.

 

[EvilOne]

When the CEO of intel gets visited by 3 ghosts in 24 days time, and decides to abandon his penny pinching ways.

 

[MooMoo444]

Once more DDR3 is produced it should fall in price a little.

 

[Perfect_Chaos]

When the pound becomes stronger it will help prices a lot aswell i suppose, how long will that take though

 

[Kribby2006]

Everything is going up, I had an Intel i7 setup in my basket at the start of last week, by then end of the week it had gone up £50, what a joke.

 

[rypt]

i suspect that their midrange will be dropped to inline with AMD, but the top end ones won't as benchmarks, encoding and a few other things will show a significant lead and Intel wants to make the cash on those chips.

By mid-range I assume you are talking about Lynnfield? Given how that is ONCE AGAIN a different socket from the new i7s, and according to Intel will not be OCable I fail to see how it is a fair comparison. If anything Phenom doing well may be a blow for Intel's idea of having 2 sockets, with 2 ranges of CPU, one OCable (the top end), one not.

 

[drunkenmaster]

By mid-range I assume you are talking about Lynnfield? Given how that is ONCE AGAIN a different socket from the new i7s, and according to Intel will not be OCable I fail to see how it is a fair comparison. If anything Phenom doing well may be a blow for Intel's idea of having 2 sockets, with 2 ranges of CPU, one OCable (the top end), one not.

I don't even know where to start tbh, another post in a forum about fair comparisons and drawing illogical conclusions. If AMD is faster at the same price as Lynnfield, it should do very well there, Lynnfield will still sell but maybe AMD will sell more than you'd expect. Why wouldn't it be a fair comparison, as for it not overclocking, thats simply not true, it does, every non overclocking feature, isn't a non overclocking feature, its simply the default turbo features needing a limit, one you can disable to overclock as you like afaik. The only difference is different pin out due to the lack of a triple channel controller, which makes it and the board significantly cheaper to produce. The top end i7 platform is for the same people that would ***** £500 on an extreme edition its the 1% of the sales chips, Lynnfield will be what dell and the rest sell en masse if the AMD counterpart is better, its only good for AMD.

 

[rypt]

I don't even know where to start tbh, another post in a forum about fair comparisons and drawing illogical conclusions. If AMD is faster at the same price as Lynnfield, it should do very well there, Lynnfield will still sell but maybe AMD will sell more than you'd expect. Why wouldn't it be a fair comparison, as for it not overclocking, thats simply not true, it does, every non overclocking feature, isn't a non overclocking feature, its simply the default turbo features needing a limit, one you can disable to overclock as you like afaik. The only difference is different pin out due to the lack of a triple channel controller, which makes it and the board significantly cheaper to produce. The top end i7 platform is for the same people that would ***** £500 on an extreme edition its the 1% of the sales chips, Lynnfield will be what dell and the rest sell en masse if the AMD counterpart is better, its only good for AMD.

Except for the fact that the i7's are not priced at £500 for the CPU, but rather far lower - with board prices driving up the cost. Xtreme editions of Intel CPUs have always been worthless in my eyes, especially given the price they wanted for them (and the lack of benefit to them). However this time it seems Intel are intent on making their lower CPUs less enthusiast friendly (remember, the problem with the i7 is NOT the CPU price really).
My point about comparison is that it's not fair to compare the Deneb to the Lynnfield, as the Deneb is going to be a better a better clocker due to whatever limiting Intel have put in (they have themselves stated that Lynnfield is not for overclocking).
Equally I dont think it has been publicly announced by AMD whether AM3 is tri-channel or not (I could be wrong).

 

[EvilOne]

Untill P55 chipset comes out i7 systems will be a huge ripoff, and like said above the cpu prices arent the problem.

 

[drunkenmaster]

Except for the fact that the i7's are not priced at £500 for the CPU, but rather far lower - with board prices driving up the cost. Xtreme editions of Intel CPUs have always been worthless in my eyes, especially given the price they wanted for them (and the lack of benefit to them). However this time it seems Intel are intent on making their lower CPUs less enthusiast friendly (remember, the problem with the i7 is NOT the CPU price really).
My point about comparison is that it's not fair to compare the Deneb to the Lynnfield, as the Deneb is going to be a better a better clocker due to whatever limiting Intel have put in (they have themselves stated that Lynnfield is not for overclocking).
Equally I dont think it has been publicly announced by AMD whether AM3 is tri-channel or not (I could be wrong).

Again, I didn't say the cpu was £500, but its still aimed at the people who would pay £500 for an extreme edition, so £130 of the price has been moved to the mobo instead of the chip, big deal, another £100 on extra mem, so what the system price is the same and thats who its aimed at.

Again Lynnfield is overclockable, the limit is simply a limit for the default overclocking as standard on the series, it stops them overclocking to far and from staying within the TDP limit so people aren't without wanting to, burning up lots of extra power with a chip overclocked that they don't need. This limit is intended to help overclock a normal chip, and can be disabled to allow normal overclocking for those that want to , its a non issue, the high end i7's have the same feature. Really the only fair way to compare chips, and theres really no other "fair" way is to see how much power you get for an amount of money.

It makes zero sense to say you can only compared Deneb against the i7's for an arbitrary reason, when Deneb Am3's will start at 2.2Ghz and go up to 3Ghz, will be priced from £100-£230 by the looks of it and will be available with cheap boards and memory which puts it squarely in the Lynnfield price bracket, in memory, boards and chips, and stops before top end i7 pricing begins. The most expensive chip looks set to be cheaper than the current lowest i7, and the rest to come out will be cheaper.

If £400 will buy you a fast lynnfield or a fast phenom 2, and £600-700 moves you up to the top i7's, why on earth wouldn't you compare Phenom 2 with Lynnfield?

 

[rypt]

Because Deneb should actually be on it's own, as it can be run in AM2+ with DDR2, so it's in a far lower price bracket as a whole system - probably lower than Lynnfield even - and yet it should perform better than C2Q, I hope.

 

[HighlandeR]

Untill P55 chipset comes out i7 systems will be a huge ripoff, and like said above the cpu prices arent the problem.

True until then Intel and Core i7 will not even be an option to most buyers, DDR3 isnt gonna exactly drop to 40 quid for pack of 4gig ram overnight and mobos arent gonna £60-80 for a good board exactly.

Maybe come Summer/fall 09 we will see Corei7 taking light.

Core i7 cpu prices are not too bad ive seen the 920s going for £240 and the 940s for £450 and the 965 extremes for £650-700 But cheapest mobos are still £200ish, and DDR3 4gig is still tad pricey at £120-150.

Intel should have released P55 and the highend boards same time frankly to make sure it secures the market and continues its Core2duo fame, but this is perhaps AMDS time again.

 

[rypt]

True until then Intel and Core i7 will not even be an option to most buyers, DDR3 isnt gonna exactly drop to 40 quid for pack of 4gig ram overnight and mobos arent gonna £60-80 for a good board exactly.

Maybe come Summer/fall 09 we will see Corei7 taking light.

Core i7 cpu prices are not too bad ive seen the 920s going for £240 and the 940s for £450 and the 965 extremes for £650-700 But cheapest mobos are still £200ish, and DDR3 4gig is still tad pricey at £120-150.

Intel should have released P55 and the highend boards same time frankly to make sure it secures the market and continues its Core2duo fame, but this is perhaps AMDS time again.

What Intel should have done is what AMD is doing, having new chips useable in current socket

Or failing that release a new socket that does not cause the prices to rocket a lot!

 

[Corasik]

What Intel should have done is what AMD is doing, having new chips useable in current socket

Or failing that release a new socket that does not cause the prices to rocket a lot!

The old 775 socket was reused for Core 2, but with 3 channel DDR3 built into the processor, the removal of the front side bus, and the addition of QPI there is nothing intel could do that would let Nehalem fit in existing boards. AMD are hardly any better, They had socket 754 and 939 before moving to AM2. AM2+ and AM3 are clever to maintain some degree of compatibility, but use an AM3 chip in an AM2 board and your still going to lose some of the newer AM3 features.

Hopefully Nehalems sockets (both the dual channel, and tripple channel versions) will have some degree of future compatibilty unless something better than QPI(pretty much hypertransport) comes around. Slightly annoying that they couldnt use the same socket for both dual and tri channel chips. Would have been nice if you could plug a tri channel nehalem into a dual channel "budget" motherboard and still have it work (at slightly reduced performance). Personally I'll stick with the cheaper end of the high end setups anyway for the extra features. Lynnfield in my eyes is just another Celeron.

The new boards are slightly more expensive to make, but mostly as already pointed out, its just the board makers trying to make extra money on early adopters. The processors themselves only have a fairly small "early adopter" penalty in their price tag.

Only thing I would have liked to see would have been a tri channel DDR-2 interface on the early chips. The extra channel would still have given a large increase in bandwidth and the lower latency on DDR2 is good when the prefetch gets it wrong and a small amount of data is needed to be retrieved quickly. Pretty sure there would be virtually no real world performance penalty by having a 3xddr2 interface, and the prices would have been considerably cheaper.

 

[rypt]

The old 775 socket was reused for Core 2, but with 3 channel DDR3 built into the processor, the removal of the front side bus, and the addition of QPI there is nothing intel could do that would let Nehalem fit in existing boards. AMD are hardly any better, They had socket 754 and 939 before moving to AM2. AM2+ and AM3 are clever to maintain some degree of compatibility, but use an AM3 chip in an AM2 board and your still going to lose some of the newer AM3 features.

Hopefully Nehalems sockets (both the dual channel, and tripple channel versions) will have some degree of future compatibilty unless something better than QPI(pretty much hypertransport) comes around. Slightly annoying that they couldnt use the same socket for both dual and tri channel chips. Would have been nice if you could plug a tri channel nehalem into a dual channel "budget" motherboard and still have it work (at slightly reduced performance). Personally I'll stick with the cheaper end of the high end setups anyway for the extra features. Lynnfield in my eyes is just another Celeron.

The new boards are slightly more expensive to make, but mostly as already pointed out, its just the board makers trying to make extra money on early adopters. The processors themselves only have a fairly small "early adopter" penalty in their price tag.

Only thing I would have liked to see would have been a tri channel DDR-2 interface on the early chips. The extra channel would still have given a large increase in bandwidth and the lower latency on DDR2 is good when the prefetch gets it wrong and a small amount of data is needed to be retrieved quickly. Pretty sure there would be virtually no real world performance penalty by having a 3xddr2 interface, and the prices would have been considerably cheaper.

939 boards were not that expensive compared to 754 boards though; and Deneb in AM2+ should perform pretty well comapred to AM3 still.