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been checking new egg core the skylake i3's but nothing all new egg is carrying is the 2 K series cpus . Wanting to build a media pc to replace my aging sony Blue ray player with its clunky media apps . Have not seen any of the lower end i3 or i5's what is up with that ?

Most likely the other CPUs are going to OEMs first.

whm1974 wrote:

Most likely the other CPUs are going to OEMs first.

Yep. i7 to the enthusiast, i3/i5 to the OEMs.

Probable another month or so before we see these CPUs in stock on vendor's shelves. Or maybe at the end of the month if you are lucky.

Definitely a paper launch. Imagine the comments if AMD had done this.

Imagine the comments if AMD had done this.

No kidding, AMD already has a black eye over complaining about "unfair reviews".

I think they were launching in Asia first and the US later.

We have the i5s and i7s available here, at least: https://www.theitdepot.com/products-Processors_C30.html

(prices are terrible).

I don't think we're expecting significant availability on the rest of the Skylake line-up until early October.

:/ yup paper launch, even here in Asia, been scouring everywhere for the chips and they are nowhere to be found on malaysian soil.. on the market at least heh.. wanted that sweet i3-6100 to replace my aging c2d for the dad/mum to use.. Guess they wont arrive before my next term starts in the UK, haven't seen any motherboards yet either. Thought they said 14nm yields have become much better since BDW-Y?

Interesting, I wonder who decides what goes where. (New Zealand) we have i5 and i7 k sku's but nothing else

They use a dartboard.

Even if the i7s/i5s are listed in the uk, their prices are out of whack if you want any that are in stock. Guess we'll have to wait until SKL-E then?

whm1974 wrote:

Probable another month or so before we see these CPUs in stock on vendor's shelves. Or maybe at the end of the month if you are lucky.

well shoot , at lest it will give time to get some more motherboards out . I am looking at the H170 boards in a matx or a mini ITX and not a lot of choices . see no need for a z board if it will only use a i3

of course not. There are no yield problems with Intel's 14nm. It's been going to good compared to 22nm! No yield issues at all.


Now, imagine how much trouble AMD and NVidia are going to have with larger chips on Samsung and TSMC process!

brothergc wrote:

At least {the delay due to Intel's paper launch of Skylake Core i3 CPUs} will give time to get some more motherboards out. I am looking at the H170 boards in micro-ATX or mini-ITX and there are not a lot of choices. I see no need for a z170 board if it will only use an i3.

You could save $13 by dropping down to H170 from Z170.

Commenting about micro-ATX LGA1151 motherboards, I wrote:

$90 ASRock H170M Pro4S
$103 ASRock Z170M Pro4S
$120 MSI Z170M Mortar
$130 Asus Z170M-Plus
$150 Gigabyte GA-Z170MX-Gaming 5

There was a launch?

I thought only the two K-series are being made available on the desktop for now. AFAIK the non-K products have not officially launched yet!

Chrispy_ wrote:

There was a launch?

I thought only the two K-series are being made available on the desktop for now. AFAIK the non-K products have not officially launched yet!

September 1, 2015: http://techreport.com/news/28957/the-sk ... est-friend

Skylake processors and systems based on them are slated to be available in Asia starting today, and Intel expects Skylake products to become available in North America "over the next six weeks."

you even commented on it

Oh yeah, there we go then, six weeks from the 1st september.

I guess these are rolling out of Malaysia as per usual, and six weeks it probably how long it takes container ships to load, make the journey, unload and for the containers to clear customs and hit the distribution channels in the US. I know the actual Pacific sailing time is 3-4 weeks depending on weather. I bet if you look on Malaysian tech retailers you'll find these things listed already.

edit:
Looks like botique builders in Malaysia are already shipping with Skylake non-K parts.

You don't ship high-value CPUs by slow ocean freight. You put them in the belly of a 747 and have them on sale in less than a week... if you actually had product available rather than just a paper launch.

I've never ordered more than 40 processors in one go but my supplier will often use the original shipping carton and put other products from my order like SSD and RAM in remaining space, so I know for a fact that Haswell i7's from Penang arrive in Europe by sea: When ordering in bulk I've received boxes of boxes of Intel processors with Penang port commision markings. For Haswell i7's that we use, the retail boxes come in distribution cartons of five, and there's room for 20 cartons in the largest box (so 100 processors per box).

I'm not saying you're wrong, perhaps to meet launch deadlines, the first batches are shipped by air, but Intel is in no rush to cannibalise Haswell sales with Skylake sales, and air freight eats into their profit margins, which makes the beancounters and shareholders sad. I'm speculating that the six week delay is shipping, but these things are definitely produced in Asia and six weeks is about the right length of delay for a sea-journey from Malaysia to the US.

I suspect the K-series received the 747 treatment you're talking about which is why they launched early (they are high-margin SKUs).
The Pentiums and i3s are definitely lower margin parts so why eat into that margin with air-freight costs?

DIY PC enthusiasts are not Intel's bread and butter. Intel does not exist to make you happy. They are going to service the big OEMs first... period. I can't believe people still don't understand this.

DIY PC enthusiasts are not Intel's bread and butter. Intel does not exist to make you happy. They are going to service the big OEMs first... period. I can't believe people still don't understand this.

Be as that may be, the DIY PC gaming market is growing.

Even stuff that is shipped internationally must pass through Customs somewhere. I've received (multi-ton) process equipment that was shipped by air from Europe to JFK in New York that was then put onto a truck and carried to the port of Savannah in Georgia for Customs to clear it before another truck carried it to the plant.

The cost isn't unbearable. You should pay less than 1€ per kg to ship a large crate by air from southeast Asia to Europe.

whm1974 wrote:

DIY PC enthusiasts are not Intel's bread and butter. Intel does not exist to make you happy. They are going to service the big OEMs first... period. I can't believe people still don't understand this.

Be as that may be, the DIY PC gaming market is growing.

I'm sure it is still in the single digits percentage wise, though. Probably the low single digits. Maybe even sub-single digits.

JustAnEngineer wrote:

Definitely a paper launch. Imagine the comments if AMD had done this.

So true.

Some of the locked Core i5 and Core i7 Skylake processor models have shown up in Newegg's listings on the first day of the fourth quarter. Newegg has priced the new processors $9 to $24 higher than Intel's list prices for quantities of 1000. Core i3 Skylake still exists only on paper.

$201 Core i5-6400 2.7 GHz (3.3 turbo)
$211 Core i5-6500 3.2 GHz (3.6 turbo)
$231 Core i5-6600 3.3 GHz (3.9 turbo)
$264 Core i5-6600K 3.5 GHz (3.9 turbo)
$332 Core i7-6700 3.4 GHz (4.0 turbo)
$360 Core i7-6700K 4.0 GHz (4.2 turbo)

Why launch a product that costs more than Haswell to make.

And, by that I mean give that the tray of 1000 price minus the current Haswell pricing is greater than the additional cost to make the i3 parts.


My guess is that it likely is. Intel's cost per transistor may have gone down as everyone else has gone up, but, their yield compared to their own 22nm process still isn't good enough to allow effectively equal pricing.


Of course, you add in the economics of the cost of an empty versus full fab, etc and you run into a lot of issues.

Availability has never been remotely this bad for like the past 10 years at least. One can say Intel is prioritizing production for laptop chips, but that is a lame excuse as it has always been that way since Conroe.

The situation for Intel looks even bleak considering a 4C GT2 Skylake is much smaller (122.4mm^2 vs 177mm^2) than 4C GT2 Haswell in terms of die size, yet Apple has no trouble selling 13M iPhone 6S in 3 days, 60% of them with an A9 chip that is only marginally smaller at 104.5mm^2 made by "lousier" TSMC.

strangerguy wrote:

The situation for Intel looks even bleak considering a 4C GT2 Skylake is much smaller (122.4mm^2 vs 177mm^2) than 4C GT2 Haswell in terms of die size, yet Apple has no trouble selling 13M iPhone 6S in 3 days, 60% of them with an A9 chip that is only marginally smaller at 104.5mm^2 made by "lousier" TSMC.

Intel intentionally limited its 14nm capacity to make sure that its fabs would remain full. Meanwhile, Apple has a "14nm" part that's really 20nm + finfets -- nowhere near as complex as the real 14nm process -- coming from two different suppliers. And they are making one chip right now with TSMC presumably doing substantially smaller runs of the A9X that will be sold in a small run of iPad Pros.

So basically: The two largest chip manufacturers other than Intel were *both* required just to get one smartphone SoC made in sufficient quantity for Apple's first finfet product launch in late 2015. They are each making one medium-sized chip, and that's it.

Meanwhile, since last year, here is an incomplete list of products that Intel has been churning out from an intentionally limited 14nm fab industrial base. Most of these products are on sale although products like the Xeon Phi are targeted at limited markets and aren't being sold on the open market:

1. Mobile Broadwell including both 2 and 4 core variants.
2. Desktop Broadwell.
3. The Xeon D, which has only gotten limited coverage on TR because it isn't made for playing games, but that chip has single-handedly sent shockwaves through the ARM camp that assumed it could waltz into the microserver world without any trouble. You'll likely never see a Xeon-D system running, but companies like Facebook and Google have been buying servers with these chips by the truckload.
4. The rest of the Broadwell Xeon lineup including 18-core high-end EX chips.
5. Knights Landing Xeon Phi with die sizes that rival or maybe even exceed the largest Fiji or GM200 Maxwell parts.
6. Mobile Skylake, which BTW is already on-sale right now. http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-15-55 ... 7854306735
7. Desktop Skylake that is now available in most high-end models and the lower end models are coming.
8. Cherry Trail... don't forget about all those 14nm Atom part and compute sticks floating around too!

Once again remember that with the exception of Cherry Trail, every single one of these products is massively more sophisticated and high-performance than a smartphone chip.

chuckula wrote:

strangerguy wrote:

The situation for Intel looks even bleak considering a 4C GT2 Skylake is much smaller (122.4mm^2 vs 177mm^2) than 4C GT2 Haswell in terms of die size, yet Apple has no trouble selling 13M iPhone 6S in 3 days, 60% of them with an A9 chip that is only marginally smaller at 104.5mm^2 made by "lousier" TSMC.

Intel intentionally limited its 14nm capacity to make sure that its fabs would remain full. Meanwhile, Apple has a "14nm" part that's really 20nm + finfets -- nowhere near as complex as the real 14nm process -- coming from two different suppliers. And they are making one chip right now with TSMC presumably doing substantially smaller runs of the A9X that will be sold in a small run of iPad Pros.

Eh, fabs being full and limiting are two problems. Intel started work on it's 14nm fabs years ago assuming they could fill them all.

They cannot. An empty finished fab and a fully functioning finished fab don't have that much difference. Unless Intel is shutting down it's fabs, at which point they just spent 5-10b+ dollars on nothing.

Also, whatever you want to call it, the A8X is currently denser than anything Intel has made on 14nm with a released die size and transistor count. Or a very optimistic estimates from Intel. The performance characteristics of TSMC/Samsung 16/14nm are similar to Intel and they have made denser chips that are selling much higher volumes.

I suspect this is due to Intel's performance being aimed more at high performance CPU than low power overall. Which is causing thermal density issues. Or was, given that was the case Intel likely found some fix(es) quite fast.

Nothing else matters. Results in the field matter.

So basically: The two largest chip manufacturers other than Intel were *both* required just to get one smartphone SoC made in sufficient quantity for Apple's first finfet product launch in late 2015. They are each making one medium-sized chip, and that's it.

With their process coming online well over a year after Intel's they've already sold more chips in just the iPhone than Intel has with their die that is around the same size as the 14nm product that Intel has sold by far the most of: Their mobile dual core with GT2.

Intel's process in theory is denser, but, well. No one cares until someone ships a product that's denser. Until that point it's a meaningless win for Intel.

Meanwhile, since last year, here is an incomplete list of products that Intel has been churning out from an intentionally limited 14nm fab industrial base. Most of these products are on sale although products like the Xeon Phi are targeted at limited markets and aren't being sold on the open market:

1. Mobile Broadwell including both 2 and 4 core variants.
2. Desktop Broadwell.
3. The Xeon D, which has only gotten limited coverage on TR because it isn't made for playing games, but that chip has single-handedly sent shockwaves through the ARM camp that assumed it could waltz into the microserver world without any trouble. You'll likely never see a Xeon-D system running, but companies like Facebook and Google have been buying servers with these chips by the truckload.
4. The rest of the Broadwell Xeon lineup including 18-core high-end EX chips.
5. Knights Landing Xeon Phi with die sizes that rival or maybe even exceed the largest Fiji or GM200 Maxwell parts.
6. Mobile Skylake, which BTW is already on-sale right now. http://www.dell.com/us/p/inspiron-15-55 ... 7854306735
7. Desktop Skylake that is now available in most high-end models and the lower end models are coming.
8. Cherry Trail... don't forget about all those 14nm Atom part and compute sticks floating around too!

Once again remember that with the exception of Cherry Trail, every single one of these products is massively more sophisticated and high-performance than a smartphone chip.

Sorry, but, the A9 is by no means a simple chip. It has been demonstrated to have performance equaling slower dual core Intel parts (by which I mean CoreM and their dual core GT2 parts). The size of the actual CPU core is probably about equal. Hell, the transistor count of Skylake/Broadwell CPU core and Twister is probably about the same.

While the CPU side is much simpler (cleaner! WAY Cleaner), beleving that Apple's interconnect isn't about as complex or their GPU isn't equal or more complex is a fallacy.

As stated before, how much volume has Intel sold of total chips? Even based off of mm^2 the odds are with the iPhone 6s/6s+ TSMC and Samsung have moved more mm^2 of silicon to the market than Intel has. And Intel had a year head start.


That's because Apple can and will afford to pay a lot of money for the chips they need, or because TSMC and Samsung are eating their margins to the razor for Apple (or both).


Intel has had about/over a year since they shipped a 14nm product to get it's stuff together and get Haswell kicked out. They haven't.


Either their 14nm parts are a step backwards (Excluding some minor cases (Broadwell with equally clocked DDR3) they're not). Or their 22nm parts cost less and are practically just the same. And OEMs don't need to redesign motherboards, and laptops, etc.


How did Sandy --> Ivy go? Fast if I remember right.
How has anything 22nm --> anything 14nm go? Well, over a year in and it still isn't over.


There's clearly a problem. Where exactly it is? Good question. I can only imagine it has to do with pricing. Intel is a master of process technology and with over a year of shipping products in devices I cannot imagine they're running into issues.