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According to TechPowerUp. Too much CPU for not as much money as the Kaby Lake i3, apparently.

It would make more sense to for Intel to drop the i3 instead and and add an six core/12 thread CPU to the Socket 1151 platform and lower prices as well. What AMD Ryzen is going to end up doing, is causing six and eight core CPUs to become mainstream like the i5 currently is.

Everyone forgets to even mention the lack of AVX on these. As a consumer (and G3258 owner), I'm sad to see it go, but as a developer, I wish it and the rest of Intel's AVX-less chips to stay gone. If not for this ridiculous b******t, I could default to AVX in the not-too-distant future. As is, what with sales of the G4560 to people who expect them to be decent gaming chips for many years to come, it'll probably be a couple years after the launch of 9th gen consoles before I can properly do that.

synthtel2 wrote:

Everyone forgets to even mention the lack of AVX on these. As a consumer (and G3258 owner), I'm sad to see it go, but as a developer, I wish it and the rest of Intel's AVX-less chips to stay gone. If not for this ridiculous b******t, I could default to AVX in the not-too-distant future. As is, what with sales of the G4560 to people who expect them to be decent gaming chips for many years to come, it'll probably be a couple years after the launch of 9th gen consoles before I can properly do that.

I forgotten about the AVX and other instructions that the i3 has but the Pentium doesn't. Perhaps you are right,but I'm not sure what benefits those would bring to the consumer level anyway.

whm1974 wrote:

synthtel2 wrote:

Everyone forgets to even mention the lack of AVX on these. As a consumer (and G3258 owner), I'm sad to see it go, but as a developer, I wish it and the rest of Intel's AVX-less chips to stay gone. If not for this ridiculous b******t, I could default to AVX in the not-too-distant future. As is, what with sales of the G4560 to people who expect them to be decent gaming chips for many years to come, it'll probably be a couple years after the launch of 9th gen consoles before I can properly do that.

I forgotten about the AVX and other instructions that the i3 has but the Pentium doesn't. Perhaps you are right,but I'm not sure what benefits those would bring to the consumer level anyway.

It's a vicious circle. Because some of the most popular CPUs don't have AVX, it is not worth adding an AVX code path to consumer code... Meaning it isn't worth paying extra for AVX.

Will be sad to see the Pentium go, it seemed like a great bargain.

What NTMBK said. I think it must have gotten that "HPC only" rep because it's got a spin-up time on Intel hardware, so if you just toss a few AVX instructions in every few millis it may be a net negative. That spin-up time? 14 microseconds on SKL as measured by Agner. It doesn't exactly take HPC to find a contiguous half milli of highly vectorizable work. On Zen, the gains are of course tiny and mostly incidental, but they're arranged such that there's no reason to not use AVX.

Ah, Hardware.fr says "Pénurie sur le Pentium G4560" ("Shortage of the Pentium G4560") which DigiWorthy translates as "Intel could Limit production of Pentium G4560 to boost Core i3 sales" which TechPowerUp translates as "Intel Pentium G4560 Cannibalizing Core i3 Sales, Company Effectively Kills it"...

I might be inclined to think this is just these chips being quite popular and supply running low, in the run up to Coffee Lake when running out of the cheaper Kaby Lake ones probably doesn't hurt Intel's bottom line much.

Possibly a good reason why Intel would reduce selling these, if it did so on purpose, is that its CPUs are relatively stronger on AVX codepaths than AMD's, so the more binaries that use AVX sooner (than they otherwise would have done), the better all Intel chips looks in all benchmarks versus AMD as Ryzen is going to be relatively less strong compared to Intel chips when benchmarking is done by running AVX-heavy code, e.g. the improvements to Cycles which brought the Core i7-6950X in ahead of the Ryzen 7 1800X rather than behind it. Intel's selling CPUs without AVX doesn't encourage application developers moving to AVX really, so why not cut it out?

AVX is definitely a competitive advantage as long as AMD only has half the AVX execution resources of the Intel chips, but Intel needs to enable AVX on all its chips in order to really flex it. So unless Coffee Lake Pentiums have AVX enabled, it won't really matter.

I don't think this is a very smart move with Ryzen 3 coming soon. On the other hand, if it props up AMD sales it may end up good for the consumer -in the long term. Short term, it does kind of suck, but that's the exact reason we need competition in the cpu market..

I've asked Intel for an official statement on this matter and will publish an article with what I hear if I hear anything back.

christos_thski wrote:

I don't think this is a very smart move with Ryzen 3 coming soon. On the other hand, if it props up AMD sales it may end up good for the consumer -in the long term. Short term, it does kind of suck, but that's the exact reason we need competition in the cpu market..

I'm wondering what pricing level AMD is aiming at with the Ryzen 3? Try to kill off both the Pentium and Core i3 CPUs?

Is the Ryzen 3 still an 8-core die, harvested - or will AMD actually be launching native quad core desktop parts soon? A 4C/4T Ryzen 3 is going to compete with the non-K i5 models, most likely.

Either way, a 2C/4T Zen-based Raven Ridge chip should be able to pick up the G4560's customers when the G4560 is truly gone. I think Zen is still generally ~10% lower IPC compared to Kaby (especially obvious in gaming where the budget G4560 excels) but the G4560 was capped at 3.5GHz anyway, so XFR boosts in the 3.7 to 4.1GHz range should close the gap nicely.

Article: http://techreport.com/news/32225/the-pe ... says-intel

Apparently a rhetorical question on Hardware.fr got way out of hand.

Looks like PC Gamer also contacted Intel for official comment.

http://www.pcgamer.com/intels-pentium-g ... continued/

Jeff Kampman wrote:

Article: http://techreport.com/news/32225/the-pe ... says-intel

Apparently a rhetorical question on Hardware.fr got way out of hand.

I've been herding gerbils for over a decade now and this is/was the kind of thing that was bound to explode before facts reentered the equation.

*lowers torch and pitchfork with sheepish expression*