Reviews - First Broadwell desktop CPUs to be Intel Core i7-5775C, i5-5675C

[HEXUS]

These LGA 1150 compatible unlocked chips will be released during Q2, says report.

Read more.

[ca197]

So I can get a chip clocked at a lower speed than the i7-4770 with less cache and glued to a still useless piece of graphics hardware .... Wow where to I sign up.

I can see why they aren't really bothering till Skylake.

[Michael H]

Less L3 cache perhaps, but far more cache total when you factor in the L4 which should be the same 128MB Crystalwell die as Haswell (although I have also seen the 64MB figure bandied about). And if you compare 4770R with 6MB L3 and Crystalwell to the standard or K-variant 4770 with 8MB L3 it seems more than a fair trade off.

[superp]

4 Cores 4 Threads, Less L3 cache, Lower clocked speed. Is this an upgrade from i7 4790k? maybe it can do more with less like they said. Is this what i was waiting for?

[MrJim]

Definitely underwhelmed. I'll be waiting for Skylake then...

[zen1966]

They released a bunch of spiel a way back, the productivity increase- 4% bit was well hidden by the trumping of the graphics improvements. Ivybridge to Haswell was very roughly 6%, so not impressive.

[ca197]

Less L3 cache perhaps, but far more cache total when you factor in the L4 which should be the same 128MB Crystalwell die as Haswell (although I have also seen the 64MB figure bandied about). And if you compare 4770R with 6MB L3 and Crystalwell to the standard or K-variant 4770 with 8MB L3 it seems more than a fair trade off.

The "Crystalwell" eDRAM is for GPU only and won't help with CPU speeds. As far as I can tell the i7 K (Now C) has only improved by about 10-15% since the i7 2700k. with another 4% we could be looking at a maximum of 20% improvement in what 4 years?

[shaithis]

The "Crystalwell" eDRAM is for GPU only and won't help with CPU speeds. As far as I can tell the i7 K (Now C) has only improved by about 10-15% since the i7 2700k. with another 4% we could be looking at a maximum of 20% improvement in what 4 years?

It's understandable to a degree though.....

Hardly anything is pushing the CPU these days but integrated graphics is the "in thing". In those 4 years, how much has the IGP increased?

Now, I would love a cheap mainstream desktop CPU that has 6 phat cores, instead of 4, but I doubt we are going to see that any time soon, hence I am sticking with ivybridge still. See that as an upshot of the situation, no need to upgrade for YEARS

[DanceswithUnix]

It's understandable to a degree though.....

Hardly anything is pushing the CPU these days but integrated graphics is the "in thing". In those 4 years, how much has the IGP increased?

Now, I would love a cheap mainstream desktop CPU that has 6 phat cores, instead of 4, but I doubt we are going to see that any time soon, hence I am sticking with ivybridge still. See that as an upshot of the situation, no need to upgrade for YEARS

6 phat cores seems an obvious use for all those transistors you get from 14nm, or what is the point in 14nm? Losing ~20W off the TDP, whoopie do.

[zaph0d]

If you want six Phat cores cheap you can get them - but it'll be an ex-server X5650 socket 1366 32nm chip though.

Plus sides include: Triple Channel memory, Great Performance/Price ratio (chips are about £50-70 on eBay) & It's pretty cool running, for example my old i7-920 could clock to 3.6GHz and would sit at 75C under full load, the X5650 will sit at 4GHz full load at 58 (both temps measured during summer with room temp of 24C)
Down sides include: It's a second hand server chip, it's a 32nm chip so it's not quite as efficient as newer models but was rated 95W-TDP @ 2.66GHz.

Still it's a good all-rounder. Mines is running @ 4GHz with all the power-saving and hyper-threading etc turned on. I'm still withing intel's specs for the voltage 1.31 of a max 1.35 if I remember correctly.

Plus if you want a cheap supercomputer you can get 2 of them and a workstation motherboard for £200-220 total, 12 Cores, 24 Threads and 96GB ram. OK so you can't overclock in a workstation board (unless you get the super ellusive SR-2) but it's still 12 cores... it'd make a great minecraft server-farm?

[DanceswithUnix]

My machine at work has a 6 phat cores (12 threads) Xeon which is 130W tdp: http://ark.intel.com/products/75780/...Cache-3_50-GHz

That is 22nm, rather expensive, and my point is that if Intel were not obsessed with "ultrabook" form factors to the point that their desktop offering here seems to be such a laptop device with the wick just turned up to 65W and no better, then they might produce something that made people sit up and think.

Technology improvements are supposed to make things either faster, or cheaper, not make them "meh"

[kalniel]

then they might produce something that made people sit up and think.

'People' aren't interested in the slightest what goes in their machine. If it does the job while using less power then great. Only a very few enthusiasts care, and as the roadmap shows, there's stuff for us later.

[DanceswithUnix]

'People' aren't interested in the slightest what goes in their machine. If it does the job while using less power then great. Only a very few enthusiasts care, and as the roadmap shows, there's stuff for us later.

For those people there are already the J2900 based machines that seem to dominate PC World.

[abaxas]

For those people there are already the J2900 based machines that seem to dominate PC World.

What would be interesting is some proper benchmarks with a J2900 and a 750ti....

My money would be on it being a great little games machine. Not enthusiast level but plenty to enjoy most titles at 1080p and decent framrates.

[zaph0d]

TBH the J2900 is a bit like a bike engine. Fine for light loads but for anything heavy it's pretty useless.

[DanceswithUnix]

What would be interesting is some proper benchmarks with a J2900 and a 750ti....

My money would be on it being a great little games machine. Not enthusiast level but plenty to enjoy most titles at 1080p and decent framrates.

Probably just about passable, judging from the socket AM1 videos out there where people plug big video cards into their cheap motherboards and fire up games on them.

However ISTR that you only get 4 PCIe lanes on a J2900, so plugging in a graphics card disables anything else that might need PCIe in the system.