i5 prices

wandplus

Limp Gawd
Joined
Jan 14, 2020
Messages
370
Does anyone else find the difference between different models a bit wide? I mean when I bought a Haswell i5 you could buy the top i5 for a pretty good price.
 
Well in the last 10 years Intel has relied a lot on artificial product segmentation to differentiate their product lines. For example, the only difference between an i5-2500K and an i7-2600K was that the 2600K had a 100mhz clock-speed advantage and Hyper-Threading was enabled. Both of those things are an example of artificial product segmentation. The chips themselves were the same, and cost the same to produce. Intel flipped a couple switches to create the artificial segmentation and sold the 2600K for hundreds more.

Intel had/has continued to hold features like Hyper-Threading hostage for artificial product-segmentation purposes, still releasing i5 chips with HT disabled 15 years after that should have become a universal feature.

But as a result of increased competition from AMD, all of a sudden, like magic, most of their i5 and even i3 chips now have HT enabled. There are less options for them to artificially gimp their i5 chips. Giving more features to their "lower-end" chips means more chance of those i5 CPU cannibalizing sales of their i7 CPUs. Their new tactic seems to be to flood the market with hundreds of different SKUs with prices all over the map.
 
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