Where are the new chips? Broadwell/Skylake/Braswell

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pxc

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It's not that they're completely absent, because you can find each of those in systems, but something just isn't right about this. It's not just a slow launch. It seems more deliberate.

Chips have trickled out with slow starts for many years, and whether or not capacity is constrained there is still some scale of product available. Now it's been months where even big launches have few channel processors available. Skylake, according to egg (via Reddit), will not get better shipments until September. Broadwell, limited by design, is nearly impossible to find.

Intel launched Braswell NUCs using (lol) $100+ Pentium and Celeron Atom models which are inferior in every way to the Braswell Atom x5/x7 models which sell for under $35. The Surface 3 is still the only device to use the Braswell Atom x7 z8700, which is insane. Normally even with the crappiest older Atoms we'd see products based on those from even 3rd tier manufacturers.

But it's not as simple as "14nm" has problems, because there are many 14nm products shipping and readily available. Whether Intel is doing this to clear out 22nm product, building up stock for Q3'15 (xmas/school/year end corporate buying) or whatever, it really needs to be more transparent about availability. What good are the launches when you generally can't buy products.
 
Maybe they're taking the Microsoft approach and are trying to kill the desktop for good.
 
It certainly is a departure from what we've been conditioned to expect. I'm told that the Americas are the only place where Broadwell-C boxed CPUs have not been made available so far; the only explanation I can think up is that Intel made a deal with some OEs so that consumers would have to buy a prebuilt desktop to get one.
 
If there is no real competition that's what you get. There is no pressure from AMD to make these chips avaialable. It has nothing to do with wanting to kill desktop. It has to do with the fact that even older chips are far superior than anything AMD has to offer.
 
Like it was said above, all of the rumors I've heard so far are that the OEMs got first dibs on an already limited supply.

On the first day of the release there were 6 units listed on amazon, but they were all on back order until mid-September, and also $100 - $150 over the MSRB
 
jwcalla said:
Maybe they're having serious yield problems with 14nm.
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Capacity problems are a possibility since Intel cut back on fab upgrades a while back, but 14nm Xeon/Braswell/Broadwell products are widely available, outside of retail boxed products for desktops.

It's just really odd to me that MS makes the *only* Atom x7 products in the whole world, because its performance and power consumption are excellent for its segment and it sells for under $35. Instead, Intel is selling crappy Braswell Atom Pentiums and Celerons in its lower end NUC line, which are slower, use more power and have weaker GPUs, all at $100+ CPU list prices.
 
Yields on older Haswell are really good so they are making a lot more than they would be with newer Broadwell / Skylake processes.
 
pxc said:
Capacity problems are a possibility since Intel cut back on fab upgrades a while back, but 14nm Xeon/Braswell/Broadwell products are widely available, outside of retail boxed products for desktops.

It's just really odd to me that MS makes the *only* Atom x7 products in the whole world, because its performance and power consumption are excellent for its segment and it sells for under $35. Instead, Intel is selling crappy Braswell Atom Pentiums and Celerons in its lower end NUC line, which are slower, use more power and have weaker GPUs, all at $100+ CPU list prices.
Click to expand...

This is normal with a problem process. Remember TSMC 40nm? Took AMD 8 months to get yields to the point where the HD 5850 dropped below $300, even though it was "launched" at $270. And it took Nvidia 6-8 months to fix Fermi performance (March to November for 480, July to January for 460). It was such a performance improvement, they relaunched it as the GTX 580 and then the 560 Ti!

Each chip has to be babied along until they get things working. They spent six months getting the dual-core yields up, and then it's on to the next chip (another six months). Expect quad cores to be widely available in September/October, although it could be later (bigger chip).

The chips that have the most to gain are dual-cores aimed at notebooks and top-end 2-in-one tablets, so they got priority. Then come quad cores, which also have high ASPs, but don't offer as much performance improvement over Haswell.

Braswell is probably lowest-priority, since the chips don't make Intel a dime. Really, Intel just got lucky that 22nm went off without a hitch, or Bay Trail would have been similarly late.

Also, on Braswell: I have to say that it's not enough of a performance increase to really entice OEMs to bite. The GPU performance is outstanding, but that's really all you get, so I imagine that all those cheap tablet makers are not fighting over first dibs. And most of the "high-end" established tablet makers have their own chipset, or are already sold on ARM, making the potential market for a high-end x86 a tough sell.

Also, those prices they list for embedded processors have always been bullshit, so don't read into it for a moment. On the subject of "cost," we actually don't know how much stopping contra-revenue has hurt new Braswell design wins.

Remember that race to the bottom Intel and Microsoft fed in 2014? Selling useable tablets for $100? Those buyers obviously don't care about high quality graphics, just video acceleration and browsing FaceTwitTube.

Well, how many new tablets are going to sell this year if the CPU performance of Braswell isn't even close to 50% faster?
 
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