Report: Haswell Refresh Prices and SKU List

12818289 said:

There is no real PC decline. People keep saying that if it is a fact but it isn't.

Well, all reports agree that retail sales have slowed down by 8-10% in 2013 so unless DIY builders are putting together ~30M more new PCs per year than they already were in 2012, the (traditional) PC market certainly is not doing well.

On a different note, Intel's pricing seems to be getting out of control: two years ago, the most expensive i3 was $125, now the cheapest Haswell-Refresh looks like it could be over $130 and the most expensive i3 will be passing i5's former entry-level pricing. That seems completely nuts.

12820194 said:

Normaly i would agree about the clockrate but this a toc that means it near no changes to the silicon designs so the clockrate is a huge meassurement. On tic's its usually the other way around.

There wasn't much of a change from SB to IB either... and leaked roadmaps for Broadwell seem to indicate there won't be much of a clock speed gain going from Haswell to Broadwell either.

A 100MHz gain at over 3GHz is not going to be noticed much - that is only 3% which is within most benchmarks' error+noise margin.

12825285 said:

12818289 said:

There is no real PC decline. People keep saying that if it is a fact but it isn't.

Well, all reports agree that retail sales have slowed down by 8-10% in 2013 so unless DIY builders are putting together ~30M more new PCs per year than they already were in 2012, the (traditional) PC market certainly is not doing well.

On a different note, Intel's pricing seems to be getting out of control: two years ago, the most expensive i3 was $125, now the cheapest Haswell-Refresh looks like it could be over $130 and the most expensive i3 will be passing i5's former entry-level pricing. That seems completely nuts.

The PC market always has ups and downs. The previous boost was most likely the influx of businesses that upgraded to 7 and in so also would buy new PCs. Since people hung on to XP for so long, especially businesses, that gave it a very large boost in sales compared to most time periods. It makes sense that it will scale down a bit. I am pretty sure it will increase again when businesses decide to upgrade to whatever version of Windows next suits them.

As for the cost, it is actually very similar and you are a bit off. The i3-4150 is close to the i3-3250 (Ivy Bridge is about 2 years ago) in specs and that was $138 on release. The entry level Ivy Bridge i5 was $182 on release, the i5-3330,. Both prices wouldn't include retailer markup either.

You are correct that the Ivy Bridge i3s started at a lower price, the i3 3220 was $117 at release but the new equivalent is the Pentium G3440; same clock speed, cache sizes and TDP on only no HT on the Pentium but it does have a better IGP than the i3 did. Its price is $90 meaning similar performance for most users at a lower price point.

Intel has redone some of its naming scheme. Atom is now Celerons and entry level Pentiums with higher end Pentiums seem to have taken over lower end i3s.

InvalidError, Broadwell is not meant to outperform Haswell but rather lower the process and as well TDP. Skylake will be performance enhancements on the 14nm node that Broadwell is supposed to introduce.

12828716 said:

The PC market always has ups and downs.

InvalidError, Broadwell is not meant to outperform Haswell but rather lower the process and as well TDP. Skylake will be performance enhancements on the 14nm node that Broadwell is supposed to introduce.

Until 2013, PC sales had NEVER had negative net annual growth. Fluctuating growth rate, sure; but always positive by some amount until 2013. Between the 90s where sales were growing by over 50%/year and the last couple of years where growth went from 10-15%/year to 2013 where sales receded by 8-10%, there is a steady trend of sales slowing down and that includes the Win7 era.

Total tablet sales on the other hand are still growing at a rate exceeding 50%/year and at the rate performance-to-price ratios are improving while entry-level costs are dropping, this will go on for a few more years. I have no trouble imagining this eating a large chunk of what people would have otherwise budgeted for a new PC or laptop.

As for Skylake being a performance enhancement, people were expecting the same thing from Haswell so I would not count on it: what little extra IPC gains Haswell's extra execution ports and scheduling entries brought, they were lost in ~100MHz lower clock margins. As I have been saying for years, the main reason PC CPUs' progress is stagnating is because all the major per-core IPC gain opportunities have been tapped out and now we are simply going deeper into the diminishing returns slope while waiting for those mainstream killer apps that may have the power to justify the design of more massively threaded mainstream desktop CPUs. Then again, if a problem is massively parallelizable and fits in the GPU's RAM, it would likely be much faster using GPGPU since the GPU would still have more raw processing power and 3-12X the memory bandwidth.

Intel devs *Sleeping since amd bulldozer*Intel price *Rising since '' '' *

Seriously? The i5's are already almost out of my price range, and I want to do a custom build soon... This isn't good news for me. :/

well, it sort of is good news, because the refresh will probabilly make non-refreshed haswell cpu prices drop a little bit.. you might wanna get those instead