We've confirmed that most of Intel's Core i7 range will go to be replaced by Lynnfield (above).
COMPUTEX 2009: Despite telling us face to face yesterday that its Core i7 920 and 950 CPU's will be around for a little while yet,
bit-tech has exclusively seen roadmaps and been given multiple confirmations that every-single-one of the X58 motherboard manufacturers is expecting: 920, 940, 950 and 965 will be end-of-life by early next year.
Only the 975 Extreme Edition and the future 6-core LGA1366 CPUs will exist on this socket, with Lynnfield engulfing the entire middle field (we're hesitant to use the word "mainstream").
LGA1366 and X58 motherboards will be thinned out in the next refresh in Q3/4 with the launch of Lynnfield on Sept. 1st, although no one had an exact date for the phasing out of these CPU products.
Intel says one thing then does another?
Discuss in the forums.
80 Comments
Discuss in the forums ReplyThis constant to-ing and fro-ing is not doing any good to the consumer.
I have to say that Lynnfield and P55 looks very impressive and is going to give AMD a good run for its money... I wish AMD would hurry up and get an SLI chipset licence from Nvidia. AMD 790FX/GX + SLI = drool
I want another GTX285 for my Phenom!! (rant over)
Intel should have not even bothered with Core i7 for desktop and just used it for Nehalem EP. Lynnfield is da shiz tho
Oh deary me
It makes a certain kind of sense to price X58 - the arguably more desirable platform - out of most people's reach, I think.
No I wont. .. look at it swing baby!
Anyway.... Why are Intel being so tight lipped about stuff... and being sneaky. Based on what's been said, and then leaked so far, I wouldn't make ANY assumptions about lynnfield.
Bummer.
I should have waited for something better, all this time I've been using an amazing, quick, stable PC. I should have kept my old rig for another year and put up with the crashes, lockups and crappy framerates for another year.
I so regret buying this wonderful PC, noone told me that its chip would be discontinued! Ok so every other chip ever made has had a finite shelf life, but I thought it was "different" this time, I thought we'd be together for ever.
Sniff...
Damn you Intel... damn you to hell
Why are you upset? Just because i5 is coming (which we all knew about months ago) doesn't mean that your system is old. Your computer is still faster than most i5 setups will ever be and as a result is pretty damned future-proof.
If you wanted to upgrade you would have to upgrade motherboard and CPU anyway, so what's changed?
I for one am happy with my i7 setup. I get great performance and I got it 1 year earlier than Lynnfield. :D
I do believe there was a touch of sarcasm in Jenny's post actually
my old P35 motherboard (socket 775 I think) has lasted a good term... taking an e6750 initially and then being upgraded to a Q9550. I would not be happy if I had bought an i7 board only to find it has a non existant upgrade path..
In my wife's machine I also upgraded hers from an AMD X2 4600 to an AMD X2 7750... so yeah.. upgrades are important I think after 2-3 years to keep the system going a bit longer if money is tight.
intel got rid of the e6600 quick- it was a little too good at ocing XD guys were hitting 4 gig on that chip before the whole 4 gig club even existed
Doe this mean the Core i5 will be better than Core i7, or will there be some new Lynnfield based i7s???
@ thehippoz, Yeah your right, I'm so happy I have the Q6600 Go, it's the first CPU I have felt good having late in the making. Intel seems to discontinue models that are "TO GOOD" ooopppsss
I'm glad that I have developed patience in my fanatical attitude toward this hobby. Proud to be a mid range purchaser. :D
LOL... +rep for you. Well said.
No.. not better than i7.
From what I can tell, it's a cut down i7 with dual channel, and no QPI onboard. Good performer.. about a match for AMD's flagship Phenom II X4 955. Early reports suggest it's a good clocker too.... but so is the i7.
I'm still glad I bought mine when I did.
Why is the i5 the i5, instead of the i9, because 5 comes before 7???
A reflection of it's inferiority of course :)
I'd still buy a i7.
People forget this, and talk about i7 owners not having any upgrade path. I beg to differ. Fact is though... I don't see why you'd want to upgrade for the foreseeable future if you own a i7.
Storm in a teacup.
It IS still annoying the way Intel just keep messing everyone about. I'd hate to be buying a rig now... as there are so many what ifs... but I'm fairly certain I'd still buy a i7 if I was buying today.
as far I saw the i5 integrated construction blocks even Nvidia future motherboards. Some Larabee extorsion?
I don't understand how it can be a "bottleneck" Right now there really isn't a faster processor (per say) out there. So either way. and are you saying its a bottleneck at stock speeds? because it is easily overclocke d above and beyond that. mine is sitting at 3.2ghz right now with minimal effort I'll prolly push it to 3.6 or 3.8 sometime in the future but right now I have no need to. Hell i could have just left it alone and been perfectly fine!
Anyways, for me it doesn't really matter what Intel do. My E6600 @ 3.6 GHz still rocks almost everything I throw at it. The only thing where I'd like to have some more grunt would be video encoding but I do that once every 1-2 weeks, so...
I'll just wait for the dust to settle then make up my mind what CPU is the way to go for me. i5, i7, i9 or AMD's 9xx BEs? Who knows [right now]?
I don't really see the issue with this - they needed something to compete with Phenom and draw people in to the i7 platform then when they have got something else to compete in the segment they drop the low end parts to avoid confusion.
It is a bit annoying but no more, the thing that gets me the most is that i5 and i7 aren't compatible.
Anyway, what I wanted to point out is that Intel said that i5 platform will be so 'Atom' that it will suffice a x8 slot (max two).
Now the customers should forget that the banal Core2 had full dual x16 for a friendly price. Intel is namely going forward with a x8 slot.
As it seems we'll soon render with 15TF.
Do you, by any chance, work for Globalfoundries? :p
Oh, and there is this little "Edit" button... please use it. ;)
Why won't they do what they did with 775, and have everything from a low end Celeron to the C2E Q9770 work on the same chipsets.
775 to 1366 to 1156 in what, a year and a half? Really really lame, Intel..
That is the "Extreme" setup for bragging rights, and now the CPU's are gonna be extremely priced also.
When the only 1366 chips left are $600+ the upgrade path will be hell...
I'd say intel is giving away market share to AMD, willingly.
maybe they have too much work ...?
Until you see the price of the 6core processor. By then everyone owning a i7 system wants it because there is nothing else to get. So Intel can ask whatever they want, probably 1200(ish)
another cup of tea?
i'll save my pennies and buy a decent SSD in a year or so, my system will last at least another 2 or 3
The SLI debacle made me look towards a i7-x58 system; it seems that Nvidia will have to put out some competitive motherboard solution or Intel play will shoot down their fat g300 geese.
They have Larry coming, they really don't need to help the competition.
The question is i5 and on processor limit for only one x16, as I wrote before.
Nvidia will apparently get what it deserves for years of jokes on customer expenses. I can't belive however in a proc. lineup without full dual x16; Intel is brewing something.
What development did they have to do to change the name in the microcode and set the multiplier a few steps higher? Doesn't seem like much to me.
The cpu would become just a second bios like chip; together with windows since the games and applications would compatibility issue free use hardware through virtualization layer.
Intel is primarly concerned how to hold the whole world hostage also in the years to come with their licence protected x86 architecture; Larabee idea. It is not important to them that the x86 belongs in a technical museum. Why construct a gasoline car if you can sell a Ferrari with hexa core exclusive licenced coal powered engine?
There are no proofs, no sources, lots of blabla and some nice fiction.
As long as you don't back up your statements I'll just call MAJOR BS.
Not in single card config, but in SLI/Crossfire, it can make a difference in the latest games.
http://www.tweaktown.com/articles/1472/intel_p45_vs_x48_crossfire_performance/index7.html
Jules Verne was seen as a writer of fiction; fiction transformed in vision and vision in product. Anyway, I was accused of working for Globalfoundries just two days ago. Maybe you and your likes should hold a conference to solve such perilous questions.
Hey, maybe I'm trying to get Nvidia over?
Wrong, why?
Did you notice the sh** MS got in when not every 10 year old printer had drivers for Vista?
There is simply no way x86 will go away, consumers (but even more important big companies who often run proprietary software) will not accept a lack of backward compability.
I still don't see any proof. Oh, and if you happen to be right [I don't say it can't happen] I WILL apologize but for now I can't really see where you got your information from and I don't believe you. :p
What was that part about a correction facility? Just because I say I don't believe things like that without proof. :|
Hypothetical question to all and sundry -
If you were upgrading now from (say) a single-core P4 2.8Ghz based system (or equivalent), which upgrade route would you take? Assume your budget is £1000 for a gaming/general use PC.
1) Buy a Core i7/X58 based system
2) Buy a Phenom II based system
3) Wait for Core i5
4) Buy a Core 2 Duo/Quad
I'm not up on prices across the pond, but I'd say wait for i5. It's going to match i7 in performance (or close enough as to not matter) and should end up being cheaper for the performance. That being said, there's really not a bad choice as things go right now as long as you don't buy a socket 775 processor.
I was going to do the same thing, but my three AMD PCs at home now suddenly all have i7s in them =/
for £1000 id get:
P45 mobo (maybe the biostar)
Q9550
4gb of something good
blow the rest on a GPU
this set up would keep you gaming longer than i7 with an appropriately cheaper GPU in my opinion. im sure many would disagree however.............
if you are talking in terms of "futureproofing" then i think this i5/lynnefield debacle clearly shows that no upgrade path is certain.
Since the i5 is running at a performance so close to the i7, they will want to differenciate the platform a bit more
now they could simply replace the 920,950 and 975 with 6-core equivalent (well they will keep the 975 since it's an extreme, like they did with the x6800 that was available for a time after the intro of the quad cores)
that way, the tripple memory channel is better used since you have more cores running and it would be a bigger difference between i5 and i7. They might charge a bit more but not really, and they will be able to validate the qpi and memory ctrl before pushing it in the xeon 55xx dual socket platform like they did with i7 and x58 (which was renamed to 5520 for the xeon)
/edit
To add a bit more info, the current line-up of xeon is only based on the D0 stepping which was released around middle of may.
So they got people buying the i7 to debug and check the entire c0 stepping.
if you go check the features of the x5570, x5560 and x5550, they have a turbo mode of 2-2-3-3 for 4-3-2-1 core active instead of the 1-1-1-2
My guess is they'll be doing the same thing with the 6-core line-up
im thinking of buying a new PC right now.. i will be using it for gaming and editing HD videos..
the problem is i dont have a clue of what to buy.. all i know is that my budget is limited, around
700USdollars (500 in euros, i guess). and that these are all what i want.
- a good processor for gaming and editing HD videos
- a good video card that cud well handle gaming and HD video editing
- at least 4GB of memory
- at least 1TB of harddrive
- a blu-ray disk drive and;
- a good motherboard that cud accommodate all of them and perhaps give way for upgrades
i hope someone cud help... thanks in advance..
Oh, and welcome to the forums. :)
The most important 2 buttons are "edit" and the reputation one. ;)
truth is i dont fully understand what the best specs are for the hardwares i want..
another is that i dont know if they wud fit my budget.. this is harder than ive anticipated..
thanks for the welcome though and the willingness to help..:p
Your best bet would be this and throwing in a quad core instead of the dual core, with a Q9550, a bit beefier psu and a 1TB HDD you should end up at about 700$.
Depending on the resolution you want to play your games at you might want to reconsider the graphics card but that would be out of budget I guess. And the 4770 seems to be quite a performer for the price.
the june buyer's guide is very helpful.. thanks to naokaji.. :)
but i should lay off my fantasy of having a blu-ray drive for a while with the kind of budget that i have..
i have a couple of questions:
1) why Intel Q9550 as processor? is it the best one for the june buyer's guide setup?
2) what exactly would you recommend for a bit beefier PSU?
sori, really have no idea...
I will not be needing or buying again until 2013.. four years.
Regardless of the whims of Intel and other makers- I can no longer justify the constant buying. :|
Does this mean that the best an 1156 platform can get is a quad core? If it was so then 1156 as a platform is not all that tempting because it's upgrade path is incredibly limited
It's like telling consumers: if you want six core then go get a 1366 motherboard with triple channel memory, much like it was before 2003: you want 64-bit then go get Itanium
I don't recall them saying one thing to the press and something else to board makers though, that's new to me anyway. It doesn't help with trying to choose a laptop, first it was Core 2 and Pentium for performance and power balance respectively, then i5 and i3, so now will they move i5 and i3 around at the same time as killing all these i7s?
[EDIT]Apologies for bump, but it was in the story list with the review of the new one!
Can't help but agree. Sometimes they seem to do it just to force a mobo upgrade.