Imagine, in some Intel office somewhere, an engineer was designing a dual core X299 part. He fruitfully imagines a man in Germany somewhere installing turn signals on a BMW, and prides himself with the knowledge that someone out there has a more pointless job then him.
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Intel Preps Dual-Core i3-7360X for X299, but Why?
- Thread starter Megalith
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That's pretty much what I was thinking, no real other reason for that. I doubt this is an entry point for x299 given that you'd pay $200 for a dual core (that's like the core2duo era prices). This is for folks that need more pcie bandwith, maybe bigger ram but not high cpu power/cores. Some kind of cuda oriented workstation build perhaps.
D
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Anything that makes Intel even a bit nervous is great for us.
Did you not read the thread? Kaby Lake-X, in any form gimps X299 to the same basic specs as Z270. You don't get extra PCIe lanes, no more memory bandwidth, no more physical RAM, and no increased I/O outside of 2x SATA 6Gb/s ports. Kaby Lake-X doesn't support quad-channel RAM. It doesn't do 128GB of RAM. You only get 16 PCIe lanes. Only a PLX chip would give it any increased PCIe lanes and even then, you end up with the bottleneck to the CPU. PLX chips are also extremely expensive and increase the cost of the motherboard by a large amount.
If you plug a Kaby Lake-X CPU into an X299 motherboard, you lose half the board's features. 16x PCIe lanes vs. 44. 64GB of RAM vs. 128GB. Dual vs. Quad channel RAM. You even lose VROC support as the VDM is missing from Kaby Lake-X. I don't know how many other ways to say it. This isn't an entry point to X299's increased I/O and features unless you plan on buying a Skylake-X CPU to replace the Kaby Lake-X CPU you bought with the motherboard.
but mobo makers are already cashing in on it and making kaby lake x only mobos
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...JKhvqpFHzTF9o5UUrSxoCIswQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
https://www.newegg.com/Product/Prod...JKhvqpFHzTF9o5UUrSxoCIswQAvD_BwE&gclsrc=aw.ds
CaptNumbNutz
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The only scenario I can come up with is something business related created for backwards compatibility or a specific OS or perhaps some industrial machinery that needs lots of I/O. However, in that scenario I would think they would give it Xeon branding since a consumer level dual core in this platform doesn't make sense.
Even that one scenario is a bit of a stretch and wouldn't justify Intel wasting money on producing this. If it were compatibility I'm sure extra cores could be disabled in the bios.
defaultluser
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You can't make use of > 16 PCIe lanes unless you upgrade to Skylake X.
These entry-level Skylake X processors are just Kaby Lake rebrands. The southbridges are interchangeable in Intel land, and the number of available PCIe lanes from the CPU can vary as well.
x299 Kaby Lake X Rebrands (entry-level, 2-4 cores) = 16 lanes, uses only dual-channel ram, limited to 64GB ram, exactly the same as it's little brother. Only difference is integrated graphics is disabled.
x299 Skylake X Core i7 (6-8 cores) = 28 lanes, quad-channel ram.
x299 Skylake X Core i9 = 44 lanes
So no, this is a case of Intel offering users an "upgrade path," except the entry-level CPU is ludicrously priced.
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I thought I'd read that Intel forbade that--any x299 mobos had to support the entire Kaby/Sky Lake-X stack. Must not be the case, or they're just ignoring that.
defaultluser
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Well that further castrates an already pointless platform.
Actually I did but I had my post sitting in browser because I forgot to click reply so your later post explaining the differences was not there when I was writing my comment. Thanks for the info nonetheless, if your info is correct it does indeed make this cpu option kind of a retarded choice for the platform/cost.
Jackpot.