News - Making sense of Intel's Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7 brands

[HEXUS]

Intel's new brand structure is supposed to be less confusing for customers, but we're scratching our heads already.

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[Infinite]

What the heck the heck is going on here? That lynnfield looks out of place as an i7, especially since it has a different socket.

I also dont think Gulftown deserves it own brand, should be squashed into the i7 range. Hopefully Intel will make an "obvious" distinction between them, maybe adding a "H" or something onto the model number.

[aidanjt]

What a complete disaster. Is Intel intentionally trying to pair sell their chipsets with their i* series CPUs or something? Because I can't think of any actual technical reason for forcing a different socket and chipset combination with each level of CPU. If anything, on die mem controllers should stabilise socket selection, and chipset especially is mostly irrelevant, it's just a big fat PCIe bridge at this point.

Pure bloody idiocy.

[kalniel]

Agreed, it's a complete mess, largely driven by Intel's repeated fudgery on sockets.

Presumably they are hoping the consumer simply asks for the CPU they want and expects Dell or whoever to worry about the motherboard details. But for the home builder this is ridiculous.

[DeludedGuy]

AMD must be laughing.

[CK_1985]

What's the point of having a nice, simple naming structure if it actually adds to the socket-related confusion for the consumer? Having three completely different sockets and at least 7 different supporting chipsets all productised under the same moniker is completely nuts!!

What annoys me the most though is that there is nothing on the current roadmap that I would want to upgrade to - Lynnfield is coming too soon, Clarkdale is a non-starter because of the IGP and Gulftown's going to be ludicrously expensive. Why can't they just make a 32nm, quad-core part? Is that too much to ask??

[aidanjt]

Agreed, it's a complete mess, largely driven by Intel's repeated fudgery on sockets.

Presumably they are hoping the consumer simply asks for the CPU they want and expects Dell or whoever to worry about the motherboard details. But for the home builder this is ridiculous.

It also kills off any hope of incremental performance upgrades for both purchasers of OEM machines and SIs/home builders.

If they wanted to, they could have used LGA1366/X58 to provide 3 memory slots per channel when used with an i5. And likewise, a P55 user should be able to pop in an i7 if they want a performance bump. I just have no idea what the product managers at Intel are thinking.

Wait.. I do, £££. Intel are getting excessively arrogant again, last time they did that, AMD slapped them silly. /me is looking forward to Intel bitch-slapping part 2.

[Platinum]

So bets on how many customers buy a core i7 lynfield and try to put it in a X58 board?

[kalniel]

It also kills off any hope of incremental performance upgrades for both purchasers of OEM machines and SIs/home builders.

If they wanted to, they could have used LGA1366/X58 to provide 3 memory slots per channel when used with an i5. And likewise, a P55 user should be able to pop in an i7 if they want a performance bump. I just have no idea what the product managers at Intel are thinking.

To be fair, they couldn't do this - PCI-Express lanes go to the bridge on X58, but direct to the CPU on P55 - i5 lynnfield has a PCI-E controller where i7 bloomfield doesn't.

All Intel need to do is keep lynnfield all as i5 and there's less confusion.. but they can't do that because it's going to be faster than base i7 chips (which we all predicted from the start).

So bets on how many customers buy a core i7 lynfield and try to put it in a X58 board?

Exactly.

[jim]

So sir, will that be a Core i3 with an LGA775 socket that used to be a Core 2 Duo with two cores no hyperthreading or a Core 2 Quad with four cores no hyperthreading or a Core i5 with a 1156 socket - a Quad Core on a P55 which is a bit like a Core i7 without the Triple Channel or the hyperthreading or a Core i5 on a P57 which is a bit like a Core i5 Quad Core on a P55 but with IGP and a Dual Core with four threads via hyperthreading, or perhaps a Core i7 Quad Core also on a 1156 socket exactly the same as the Core i5 Quad Core on a P55 except it has 8 threads and hyperthreading, which then makes it i7, probably because it's a bit like the current i7 which is also a Quad Core with 8 threads via hyperthreading but it's on an X58 board with a 1366 socket and triple channel instead of dual channel, although if you want that i7 you might as well wait for the i9 which like the previously mentioned i7 uses an X58 board with a 1366 socket and triple channel memory, except it's got two more cores than the i7 making it a six-core twelve-thread processor?

Sir? Where've you gone?

[aidanjt]

So bets on how many customers buy a core i7 lynfield and try to put it in a X58 board?

Bad odds, small return.

[Terbinator]

So sir, will that be a Core i3 with an LGA775 socket that used to be a Core 2 Duo with two cores no hyperthreading or a Core 2 Quad with four cores no hyperthreading or a Core i5 with a 1156 socket - a Quad Core on a P55 which is a bit like a Core i7 without the Triple Channel or the hyperthreading or a Core i5 on a P57 which is a bit like a Core i5 Quad Core on a P55 but with IGP and a Dual Core with four threads via hyperthreading, or perhaps a Core i7 Quad Core also on a 1156 socket exactly the same as the Core i5 Quad Core on a P55 except it has 8 threads and hyperthreading, which then makes it i7, probably because it's a bit like the current i7 which is also a Quad Core with 8 threads via hyperthreading but it's on an X58 board with a 1366 socket and triple channel instead of dual channel, although if you want that i7 you might as well wait for the i9 which like the previously mentioned i7 uses an X58 board with a 1366 socket and triple channel memory, except it's got two more cores than the i7 making it a six-core twelve-thread processor?

Sir? Where've you gone?

Oh how i lolled. This post ^ needs stickying somewhere.

[Platinum]

Double post

[aidanjt]

To be fair, they couldn't do this - PCI-Express lanes go to the bridge on X58, but direct to the CPU on P55 - i5 lynnfield has a PCI-E controller where i7 bloomfield doesn't.

Meh, forward planning of the platform would still have avoided this mess in the first place. And they still have a chance to clean it all up before the rest of the platform hits the market. But it looks like they're still going ahead with this insanity, regardless.

[kalniel]

Meh, forward planning of the platform would still have avoided this mess in the first place.

If you look at the main objective with i7 bloomfield it makes a bit more sense - AMD still had a better server chip at >4s due to hypertransport. Bloomfield is all about QPI, Intel's version, but it takes up a fair amount of space on the die. At the same time for the home users they didn't really need QPI so Intel could cut it while the smaller PCI-E controller being moved to the CPU enabled a very cheap chipset layout.

So far so good - server market and home market clearly differentiated. But Intel took onboard another lesson from AMD - giving home users access to server type hardware goes down well with enthusiasts, hence i7 bloomfield as we know it. I don't mind that arrangement - enthusiasts using server derived hardware while the mainstream/performance etc use more appropriate hardware with the cost savings that go with it. It's just this daft move to muddy the distinction between the two with the same core class.

[Fraz]

Intel keep trying to make things simpler... but don't realise that changing their naming scheme every year actually makes it more complicated no matter what they do.