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Comment by dragontamer | Hacker News Reader

> 1. Why doesn't Intel and actually name the chips to make them clearer?

Because it makes more money this way. "Cheap", "Expensive" and "Middle ground" is the optimal marketing strategy.

It feigns transparency but really it is just an opportunity to exploit a common bug in human-brain logic. Specifically, Decoy Pricing.

The i5 and i7 are both quad-core CPUs clocked at no more than 100MHz away from each other. But the i7 is $100 more to make the i5 look like a good deal. When consumers buy the i5 they "think" they got a good deal, when in reality, Intel priced the i7 to make them feel this way.

Read up on Decoy Pricing to learn about this effect: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pricing_strategies#Decoy_prici...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Decoy_effect

Also, don't complain about marketers taking advantage of human psychology. That's their freaking job. Instead, you should take advantage of it too.

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It's not working.

Instead of people being confused and accidentally buying a more expensive PC than they need, they just stop buying PCs altogether because there is no clearly communicated benefits for buying a new one.

Of course its not working anymore. Intel has been using the same marketing strategy for roughly 7 years now.

Intel's marketing is due for an update. But for these past seven years, the "Decoy Pricing" of i3 vs i5 vs i7 has upgraded tons of users to i5s without those users fully appreciating the benefits of i3 vs i5 vs i7.

Its rather difficult for me to explain the difference between all three chips, and my uncles / aunts often just settle on i5... or even i7 "just in case".

Trust me on this: the decoy pricing has worked this past half-decade. That the marketing has gotten stale over the course of seven YEARS is no surprise... but how many other systems have had the same freaking name for seven years at a time?

>The i5 and i7 are both quad-core CPUs clocked at no more than 100MHz away from each other.

I'm not sure thats a fair comparison - clock rate isn't the only thing and the current high end i5/i7 chips (6600k and the 6700k) are 500Mhz apart, and the i7 (as always) has hyperthreading (in some applications, hyperthreading is actually very useful) while the i5's don't. And while the i7 has a 15% higher clockrate, it is ~20% faster, while being 40% more expensive. With the k-series specifically, the i7 having a higher base clock also means you can overlock it better.

FWIW, I don't find Intel's naming scheme unclear, but OTOH, I have been following CPU/GPU version numbers for over 10 years so I could be blind to the confusion.

I have an i5-5200U and it has hyperthreading. The only difference I could see was a slightly higher clockrate, and the Intel management stuff.

Nemothekid and I were mostly talking about quad-core desktop chips.

The i5-5200U is a dual-core laptop chip under 20W TDP. Its very different from the i5-6600k that Nemothekid was talking about.

So when buying an i5 I am in fact getting much more performance per cost compared to the i7, because Intel decided to make the i7 much more expensive in order to make the i5 seem like it has much better performance per cost?

Is the cache size and turbo boost the same though?

It's also much more expensive to produce an i7. i7 are near perfect chips and are able to run higher clock rate efficiently and safely while i5s are more "standard" and have their performance clamped down to what they can safely handle. There are less i7 chips rolling off the lines, which increases their price.

Hopefully somebody who knows more about this than me can jump in and fill in the blanks here.

EDIT: I communicated my point poorly and the comments below mine explain this is much clearer terms

I don't know Intel's specifics, but often there's only a few chips that a manufacturer makes... and depending on the Quality / testing of the chips... the chips are binned into different categories.

As a hypothetical example (I'm not 100% sure if this is how Intel does things), and i5 could just be an i7 except it couldn't handle the higher clock rate. So instead of throwing away a chip that's limited in clock... Intel will sell the chip as an i5.

Or perhaps in another chip, the hyperthreading portion got borked because of a piece of dust landed in the lithography. So instead of selling it as an i7, the hyperthreading portion is fused off and the chip is sold as an i5.

You're the guy who knew more and filled in the blanks! I am super fascinated by this topic (and an outsider). Do you have any specific examples or situations that you know of this happening? The hypothetical you gave above was awesome and now I'm curious for more.

AMD's Tricore vs Quadcore... something (I think Phentoms??) were definitely this. Some Tricores were able to turn into quad-cores with some firmware hacking.

The IBM-Cell in the PS3 was a different approach to the same problem. The Cell was specified as 7-SPUs and 1-CPU, but in actuality... the manufacturing process made 8-SPUs and 1-CPU.

IBM assumed that one of the SPUs would fail during manufacturing, so they only promised to deliver 7 of them per PS3.

You can literally see the 8 SPUs: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Cell-Pro...

There's lots of ways to approach the problem. Manufacturing is an imperfect process: not everything is made identically. So the manufacturers have to figure out how to test for differences and... if necessary... sell the same "manufactured" chip in different bins.

Thanks for taking the time to go further on this and link that image, very cool stuff.

> AMD's Tricore vs Quadcore... something (I think Phentoms??)

Phenom.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AMD_Phenom

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phenom_II

Not all the hardware of Cell on PS3 was available if you run the official Linux port. Which was later blatantly removed.

Historically, I don't think it has worked like this for Intel. It costs way more to have multiple designs so they are all pretty much the same few chips with the packaging changed to disable parts. Sometimes the disabled parts failed QC but the numbers that fail QC but are still usable are not high enough for the high volume parts.

Really it is just a way to do differential pricing. Some people will pay $500, some only $100 while the part only cost $25 to make. The way to maximize profits it sell to both, and find a way to justify the price difference.

The other thing with "decoy pricing" is that you "throw away" the cheapest option without proper research.

The Core i3-6320 is about $60-70 cheaper than the i5-6600k, but on applications that don't benefit (sufficiently) from multiple cores, it can perform nearly as well. Anecdotally, friends building PCs always compare i5 and i7 and never consider the i3, but for their real world uses (many games!) it would be just perfect (and the savings could be thrown at the video card where it'd make more of a difference.)

The expected "close enough to state of the art" lifetime of hardware is now so long that you can write off the premium paid for extra cores over many years.

Would i be willing to pay 35$ extra per additional core if I knew I would want to replace the hardware within two years anyway? Questionable. But when hardware lasts half a decade? The premium per core per year becomes irresistably low. The i7-2600k will soon have it's sixth birthday...

I don't disagree. The difference between a $160 6320 and $330 6700 is only $170, and 8 years (how old my Phenom II is...) reduces that cost to barely over $20/year.

However, whether "the core is going to be fully utilized" is another question. If you only ever need 2 cores, it is wasted money, plus, if your focus is on gaming, and your budget requires you to make choices based on right now, the extra $170 can be the difference between getting a Radeon 480 or a Geforce 1070.

(Since I hope my next build lasts another 8 years, I'll probably "pad" my build with an i5... I've fallen into the trap!)

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