The Death of Intel’s Broadwell Has Been Greatly Exaggerated - Socketed Broadwell Continues
by Ryan Smith on September 17, 2015 8:45 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Broadwell
- Crystal Well
- Iris Pro
To hop right into the heart of matters, IT World published an article earlier this afternoon stating that Intel was discontinuing their two desktop Broadwell socketed SKUs, the Core i7-5775C and the Core i5-5675C. The two SKUs are notable because they are to date the only socketed Broadwell processors on the desktop, and they are also the only socketed desktop Core processors available with a GT3e Iris Pro GPU configuration – that is, Intel’s more powerful GPU combined with 128MB of eDRAM.
The idea that these processors were discontinued came as quite a shock with us, and after asking Intel for more details, the company quickly responded. Intel has made it very clear to us that these processors have not been discontinued, and that the company continues to manufacture and sell the processors as part of their current Broadwell lineup.
While the company doesn’t have an immediate explaination for the confusion at this time, we believe it may stem from a mix up over Intel’s plans for GT3e/GT4e Skylake parts on the desktop. In short, the company does not have any socketed GT3e/GT4e Core family parts on their roadmap for Skylake, so these Broadwell parts will not be seeing a Skylake refresh. That said, it should also be noted that Intel has not yet begun to ship GT3e/GT4e Skylake chips in other form factors (e.g. the 45W mobile H series), so Intel’s current Broadwell SKUs remain as their top-of-the-line SKUs for graphics across all segments, and it’s likely that will remain the case until 2016 when the Skylake 4+4e parts launch for mobile.
Intel's Skylake Roadmap
Part of the confusion may also stem from a lack of good supply for these processors in the US. Though we’ve seen evidence that the supply is ample in Europe and Asia, retailers such as Newegg have regularly been out of stock of these two processors since their launch in June. Intel’s last comment on the matter, made to the Tech Report back in August, is that the overall supply situation should pick up through Q3, which at this point is the rest of September. After which these SKUs will remain available and Intel’s top desktop graphics SKUs throughout the run of Skylake.
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BMNify - Friday, September 18, 2015 - link
Ryan, is Intel Shipping Skylake Mobile H 4+2 part? Dell is waiting for Skylake H to refresh XPS15 with infinity display and they don't need 4+4e part as they use discreet Nvidia GPU in the laptop.DanNeely - Friday, September 18, 2015 - link
Glad to see Dell's expanding the infinity display line; are they planning to bring it to any other models beyond the XPS15 yet? Pity they're still using a neckbeard/nosehair camera to keep the top bezel as small as possible though.BMNify - Friday, September 18, 2015 - link
You can expect infinity displays in one or two Dell Enterprise Precision laptops but those will be restricted to 13 and 15 inch displays, similarly consumer side will get XPS 13 and 15. I don't care about camera placement as i never use it and prefer the ultrathin bezel at the top to keep device dimensions as small as possible.bolkhov - Friday, September 18, 2015 - link
"95W Broadwell" is Xeon E3 1285v4.And Xeons E3v4 are almost mythical, only journalists got their hands on them.
atbennett - Friday, September 18, 2015 - link
The ITworld story has since been corrected. It is, in fact, the Skylake-C and not the Broadwell-C that has been discontinued.http://www.itworld.com/article/2984695/hardware/in...
Brian_R170 - Friday, September 18, 2015 - link
I guess I should feel happy to have found an i7-5775C at a good price for my small form-factor build. I was wondering if buying Broadwell with Iris Pro would be a good idea if a Skylake deskop with Iris Pro arrived 3 months later. Now it looks like that's not going to happen.The unfortunate problem that I ran into is that motherboards are less compatible with Broadwell than their manufacturers lead you to believe. I tried two now-discontinued Asus boards that said they support 5th-Gen CPUs and updated the BIOS (with a Haswell installed), but still ran into issues with video output and boot devices with the Broadwell. If my experience is widespread, then Broadwell Desktop may still be doomed.
jrs77 - Monday, September 21, 2015 - link
The i7-5775C is a perfect CPU for a SFF-Workstation. I run it on a Gigabyte H97N-WiFi mITX board with the latest BIOS and it runs perfectly fine. No bootup-issues, no iGPU-issues, etc. It just works as intended.Might be a problem with certain manufacturers rather then a real widespread problem.
Kvaern2 - Friday, September 18, 2015 - link
I don't really get why Intel would want to keep a consumer Broadwell around unless there's issues with Skylake S + edram giving them no other choice?drothgery - Friday, September 18, 2015 - link
A high-end CPU with top-end integrated graphics really is a pretty niche part. Intel didn't release one with Haswell.blahsaysblah - Friday, September 18, 2015 - link
Because there has not been a practical impact between different memory speeds for a very long time on Intel platforms. Unless you are using integrated GPU and than you're not going to pay a premium for memory anyway. Can easily buy a GTX 750 ti instead.PCI Express SSDs and NVMe are super expensive compared to good vanilla SATA SSDs.
And lastly, DDR4 16GB sticks are not readily available at prices close to 2x8GB sticks.
Jumping on first generation has never worked out for a significant subset of buyers. Motherboards will inventively have incompatibilities and bugs to be worked out of revision 0.
So what do you get other than maybe 5% CPU performance bump from switching platforms right now?
So for the many many tons of users that have SATA SSDs and free or cheap DDR3 access, getting a top of line 1150 to update their aging platform makes a lot of sense.
Since you are force fed an integrated GPU, why not get a CPU that will enhance your system with the 128MB L4 cache instead of just guaranteed waste of space.
That's why my trusty Q6600 @ 3.0Ghz from day one and rock solid all these years on stock Intel cooler will be replaced by i7-5775C.
My story and im sticking to it, unless you give me good feedback than i might change my mind.