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Comment by wlesieutre | Hacker News Reader

Sure, but with a $300 budget on Intel you're choosing between an i7-7700K or a Xeon E3-1245v6, which are all but identical.

The Xeon has a slightly higher base clock, slightly lower turbo (all clocks are changed by 0.1 GHz), ECC, and a locked clock multiplier. It appears to benchmark consistently a couple of percent below the i7.

What's even the point of that product segmentation existing? To annoy their customers? I'd rather just buy a $300 processor that checks all the feature boxes instead of all but one.

http://www.cpu-monkey.com/en/compare_cpu-intel_xeon_e3_1245_...

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I once heard there is certain mentality that when given more options, more people end up making purchases where they otherwise would not. For instance, if you have one fast food chain along a short stretch of road, less people will go to that one location than if there were multiple, competing chains in the same area.

I believe this is called agglomeration[0][1], and may have parallels beyond physical, competing stores, into realms like similar, but differently named CPU's.

[0]http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/abs/10.1177/0042098017694131 [1]https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economies_of_agglomeration

edit: rplst8 mentions binning, and that seems like another likely factor as well.

The product segmentation is basically for different markets, but also for process maturity.

Mobile chips are very small, under powered, and under clocked. They get fabbed first.

Then your core i3/i5/i7/E3's are all fabbed. As the process matures and can be expected to regularly handle 4GHz.

Next your E5/E7's get ran, normally in a few waves. Your _enthusiast_/workstation cores are generally fabbed with E5/E7 engineer samples which get sent out for testing. These have [1] 20+ cores so you need to know your process is stable so you don't have to sell >50% of them as 8-16core Xeons.

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But yeah the product segmentation is mostly to gate access. Only Xeons offer ECC [1].

And only [1] i5/i7 offer unlocked multiplers.

Ultimately this started to be a organization issue. Consumer sales (i3/i5/i7) doesn't even talk to enterprise sales (E5/E7). Consumer support can't answer questions about enterprise chips.

My personal opinion is the only reason Intel is still in business is they have a monopoly. Their anti-consumer practices are down right twisted.

[1] can/only are strong words there are a lot of exceptions/gotchas in Intel's product lines. Celerons/Pentiums sometimes have ECC, i3's and Pentiums have had unlocked Multiplers. There is a line of Xeons with unlocked multiplers. IDK

> Only Xeons offer ECC

> And only [1] i5/i7 offer unlocked multiplers.

These statements are false, which you yourself acknowledge later in your post. You don't get credit for noting a caveat when the caveat is that your point is entirely false, at least in my book.

Intel no longer manufactures 2-core Xeons so Pentiums and i3s support ECC nowadays. This isn't uncommon, this has been the norm literally since they stopped making 2C Xeons (Haswell?).

And there are currently unlocked i3s in the lineup, just like there have been unlocked Pentiums in the past. It's the norm that Intel offers a barnburner overclockable SKU somewhere in the low end. They don't always, but they do it probably every other generation.

There has been one Pentium and i3 that are unlocked since the start of the Nehalem era.

What's up with the i3-6320 supporting ECC but the i3-7320 no longer supporting it? Intel is at the least, very inconsistent with ECC on the consumer side.

ECC was probably not for consumers. I think they needed to have an offering for processors smaller than E3 for pro needs, and somehow merged it with some i3. Also check for embedded options: those are basically LTS, so low volume and/or high latency designed specialty electronics can use them without having to update all the time. I've not checked if there still are some offering on some newer gen i3, but Intel can very well have internal restructuring between their consumer and their pro-branch, which I remember having read are not very integrated...

Best I can come up with is binning. Maybe some CPU's fail on the ECC front, so they sell those as 7700 and up the factory boost clock to compensate and 'market to consumers'.

Or maybe the MSRPs vary wildly, but in practice prices converged?

The memory ECC is a tiny bit of logic right next to all other memory logic in the MC, it seems very far fetched to me that there would be a binning process for specifically the instance of that logic being broke but the data logic next door working just fine.

Note that the ECC on the processor's internal data buses and caches is completely independent of whatever ECC the memory controller may or may not use.

> Best I can come up with is binning

Bingo.

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