Why does Pentium still exist?

[Mnemosyune]

Hey guys, 

Just a quick question on why the Pentiums still exist when there's the i3?

[TheRandomness]

Now that they have hyperthreading, the better question is why do the i3s exist? (Other than AVX and AVX2)

[porina]

2 minutes ago, TheRandomness said:

Now that they have hyperthreading, the better question is why do the i3s exist? (Other than AVX and AVX2)

Because AVX/FMA  Their lack on Celeron/Pentiums is a deal breaker for me, although I recognise they might not be important in very low cost applications they're targeted at.

[TheRandomness]

Just now, porina said:

Because AVX/FMA  Their lack on Celeron/Pentiums is a deal breaker for me, although I recognise they might not be important in very low cost applications they're targeted at.

Well, since the only difference are those instructions, why not lower the price of the i3s because why would you pay $40 more for a few sets on instructions?

[Misanthrope]

Have you seen the new Pentiums that match all specs of i3s includying hyperthreading? (Yeah not some fucking instruction that most game won't use and would account for maybe 2 or 3 more FPS best case)

 

Wait 1 or 2 months before every budget reviewer gets one on their hands, you'll be asking "Why does the i3 still exists"

[SCHISCHKA]

It is a very old brand that is associated with intel. Wikipedia has the meaning of it; some Greek god written in Latin/roman style. I see them as the business product for office work and not a real computer workstation. Also apparently they can't trademark numbers and are not creative enough to create new trademarkable names every year. It's not a crappy junk celeron but cannot crunch numbers like the core series

[Aereldor]

They're good value, and this is the second time they've brought incredible value to the market as Gaming CPUs. I'm sure everyone here remembers the Pentium G3258, which you could get up to 4.8 GHz on a $40 H81 board.

 

I don't know much about AVX and AVX2, but they have the same amount of cache, similar clock speeds, and thus; very similar performance. The $64 Pentium G4560 and $75 Pentium G4600 fall just short of the Core i3 6100, while the $90ish Pentium G4620 beats it, coming very close to the Kabylake Core i3 7100.

[SCHISCHKA]

10 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

Have you seen the new Pentiums that match all specs of i3s includying hyperthreading? (Yeah not some fucking instruction that most game won't use and would account for maybe 2 or 3 more FPS best case)

 

Wait 1 or 2 months before every budget reviewer gets one on their hands, you'll be asking "Why does the i3 still exists"

the Pentium and i3 have been overlapping in performance for certain tasks for a while. Depends on the software application. there should be a difference in the igpu. I just had a look at the marketing and i3 is sold as 4K capable where the Pentium is not

[SCHISCHKA]

3 minutes ago, Aereldor said:

They're good value, and this is the second time they've brought incredible value to the market as Gaming CPUs. I'm sure everyone here remembers the Pentium G3258, which you could get up to 4.8 GHz on a $40 H81 board.

 

I don't know much about AVX and AVX2, but they have the same amount of cache, similar clock speeds, and thus; very similar performance. The $64 Pentium G4560 and $75 Pentium G4600 fall just short of the Core i3 6100, while the $90ish Pentium G4620 beats it, coming very close to the Kabylake Core i3 7100.

Avx is floating point stuff e.g. Blender 

[porina]

18 minutes ago, TheRandomness said:

Well, since the only difference are those instructions, why not lower the price of the i3s because why would you pay $40 more for a few sets on instructions?

Interesting question. It's up to Intel how they want to fill the lineup. Personally I don't want to give up AVX at the upper low end. With Pentium moving up in performance, it does put the squeeze on the i3s. I think the i5 is now the odd one out without HT and I can't but help wonder if they need an update in that area too... 

 

2 minutes ago, SCHISCHKA said:

Avx is floating point stuff e.g. Blender 

The standard version of Blender, at least that used to run the Ryzen benchmark, doesn't use AVX.

[Misanthrope]

7 minutes ago, SCHISCHKA said:

the Pentium and i3 have been overlapping in performance for certain tasks for a while. Depends on the software application. there should be a difference in the igpu. I just had a look at the marketing and i3 is sold as 4K capable where the Pentium is not

I guess but since this is just movie playback and we're talking desktops I don't see too many people going "Laptop? Dedicated player? No I wanna media center PC!"

[SCHISCHKA]

6 minutes ago, porina said:

Interesting question. It's up to Intel how they want to fill the lineup. Personally I don't want to give up AVX at the upper low end. With Pentium moving up in performance, it does put the squeeze on the i3s. I think the i5 is now the odd one out without HT and I can't but help wonder if they need an update in that area too... 

 

The standard version of Blender, at least that used to run the Ryzen benchmark, doesn't use AVX.

Blender does use it. I looked into it when avx2 came out

[SCHISCHKA]

5 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

I guess but since this is just movie playback and we're talking desktops I don't see too many people going "Laptop? Dedicated player? No I wanna media center PC!"

In electronics everything is usually marketed in three levels; gold,silver,bronze also called goldilocks marketing. I don't know why intel is trying to apply their crappy gpu to the marketing model. Might be hidden license costs

[Misanthrope]

1 minute ago, SCHISCHKA said:

In electronics everything is usually marketed in three levels; gold,silver,bronze also called goldilocks marketing. I don't know why intel is trying to apply their crappy gpu to the marketing model. Might be hidden license costs

If they wanted a good igpu why not put the Iris pro 6200 on the i3 then? They haven't used it since Broadwell 1150 if I remember correctly and it pretty much blows all other integrated graphics out of the water even AMD stuff.

 

My guess is they had the option of "An actually respectable i3 that could create solid, media center and budget gaming rigs all on it's own" and "Same fucking shit as always" and decided for the cheaper second.

 

But again is baffling that they would include hyperthreading on the pentiums: The logic here would be to make the better igpu on the i3 artificially better than the one on the pentium by also neutering the performance without hyperthreading. 

 

The more I think about it the more my head hurts.

[SCHISCHKA]

8 minutes ago, Misanthrope said:

If they wanted a good igpu why not put the Iris pro 6200 on the i3 then? They haven't used it since Broadwell 1150 if I remember correctly and it pretty much blows all other integrated graphics out of the water even AMD stuff.

 

My guess is they had the option of "An actually respectable i3 that could create solid, media center and budget gaming rigs all on it's own" and "Same fucking shit as always" and decided for the cheaper second.

 

But again is baffling that they would include hyperthreading on the pentiums: The logic here would be to make the better igpu on the i3 artificially better than the one on the pentium by also neutering the performance without hyperthreading. 

 

The more I think about it the more my head hurts.

That's what I saying. They don't want a good igpu on the bottom tier product. They are acting like nvidia and amd gpu don't exist

[porina]

13 minutes ago, SCHISCHKA said:

Blender does use it. I looked into it when avx2 came out

The standard release? When the Ryzen benchmark came out I did a bunch of testing on it. After clock normalisation its performance was same on CPUs with and without AVX, the implication being it is not using AVX in that case. Someone external to Blender (I think on Anandtech forum) did create an AVX supporting version separate from that, but I didn't try it. I'm not familiar enough with Blender to comment beyond that.

[typographie]

2 hours ago, Mnemosyune said:

Hey guys, 

Just a quick question on why the Pentiums still exist when there's the i3?

Celerons and Pentiums exist because there are a lot of use cases that don't demand a $125 CPU. We tend to lose sight of this in the tech enthusiast echo chamber, but i3's are relatively powerful midrange CPUs in a world dominated by cheap office PC, laptop, and mobile sales.

[NumLock21]

3 hours ago, Mnemosyune said:

Hey guys, 

Just a quick question on why the Pentiums still exist when there's the i3?

To understand why, read up on their history and when pentium came out.

 

2 hours ago, Misanthrope said:

If they wanted a good igpu why not put the Iris pro 6200 on the i3 then? They haven't used it since Broadwell 1150 if I remember correctly and it pretty much blows all other integrated graphics out of the water even AMD stuff.

 

My guess is they had the option of "An actually respectable i3 that could create solid, media center and budget gaming rigs all on it's own" and "Same fucking shit as always" and decided for the cheaper second.

 

But again is baffling that they would include hyperthreading on the pentiums: The logic here would be to make the better igpu on the i3 artificially better than the one on the pentium by also neutering the performance without hyperthreading. 

 

The more I think about it the more my head hurts.

They have more on their mobile, but the laptops that have them a way too expensive and the amount you spend on that, might as just focus on a laptop that has a dedicated graphics.  It would be nice to have a 2 in 1, 13"ultrabook with a bit of gpu power like the iris pro, but they don't exist. Razer blade stealth is another one that would be perfect if it has iris pro on it. 

[Mira Yurizaki]

Everyone's asking why the "i3" exists when Intel hasn't even announced any successor to the i3-6000 series. You may as well went back in time and asked NVIDIA why the 8800 GTX and Ultra still existed when the 8800 GT and GTS 512MB were around and kicking both their butts (well, in terms of value).

 

Anyway. Pricing and marketing reasons. i7's are >$300, i5's are $200-$300, i3's are $120-$160, and Pentiums are $60-$100. Celerons might exist, but they're definitely cheaper than Pentiums.

 

Also for most people, they don't need a lot of power. Most people these days go on the internet or watch YouTube/Netflix, etc.You know what can do that these days? A $35 Raspberry Pi 3.

[spellmanuk]

they still have a place in the market thats the top and bottom of it PC world in the UK still sell cheap £200 all in one and laptop machines running pentiums and tbh for someone that wants a modern looking windows 10 computer for browsing the web and light office work not everyone needs an i5 or i7 in this world 

[spellmanuk]

2 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Everyone's asking why the "i3" exists when Intel hasn't even announced any successor to the i3-6000 series. You may as well went back in time and asked NVIDIA why the 8800 GTX and Ultra still existed when the 8800 GT and GTS 512MB were around and kicking both their butts (well, in terms of value).

 

Anyway. Pricing and marketing reasons. i7's are >$300, i5's are $200-$300, i3's are $120-$160, and Pentiums are $60-$100. Celerons might exist, but they're definitely cheaper than Pentiums.

 

Also for most people, they don't need a lot of power. Most people these days go on the internet or watch YouTube/Netflix, etc.You know what can do that these days? A $35 Raspberry Pi 3.

 

[Mira Yurizaki]

1 minute ago, peej said:

The way it sounded like how everyone was comparing the Pentium G4000 series to the i3-6000 series, you'd think they'd catch wind of this

 

Also dat 7350K

[spellmanuk]

1 minute ago, M.Yurizaki said:

The way it sounded like how everyone was comparing the Pentium G4000 series to the i3-6000 series, you'd think they'd catch wind of this

 

Also dat 7350K

 

i know right dual core at its finest  

[porina]

11 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Also dat 7350K

I really want one, but not at the pricing I'm seeing...  

[TheRandomness]

3 hours ago, porina said:

Interesting question. It's up to Intel how they want to fill the lineup. Personally I don't want to give up AVX at the upper low end. With Pentium moving up in performance, it does put the squeeze on the i3s. I think the i5 is now the odd one out without HT and I can't but help wonder if they need an update in that area too... 

 

The standard version of Blender, at least that used to run the Ryzen benchmark, doesn't use AVX.

Could give the i5s hyperthreading and then make the i7s have 3 way SMT or something  I mean, a 4 core 12 thread CPU does sound fun, no?