Intel Isn't Living In The Real World

[SickBeast]

I guess everyone is buying smartphones and tablets now and the PC is on the decline.  It's really too bad because I think the PC is the most compelling gaming platform by far and it's still needed for most professional applications.  Actually it might not even be the declining PC sales that are the real problem.  The real problem is that we have not seen any real CPU performance improvements since Sandy Bridge was released many years ago.  So pretty much anyone with Sandy Bridge or newer has no real reason to upgrade.  That has got to be affecting Intel's sales and PC sales in general.  Intel is basically competing with themselves.

They could easily solve this problem by releasing CPUs with more cores.  Quad core i3s and octa core i7s.  People would line up to buy those and Intel could easily do it, albeit with smaller margins.

Moar corez?!?!

I don't think we need that, use for multithreading is pretty sparse, and they already sell chips that run 4/6/8/12 threads.

I think what intel is competing with is if you're most of the market a Core 2 Quad is probably fast enough for you. You can only run Word and teh intarwebz so fast. (and gaming is mainly GPU dependent)

Quad core i3s would sell like hotcakes and gamers and power users would line up for octa core i7s as well. Intel could just remove the iGPU from those chips and use the die space for more cores. Or even just scale back the iGPU somewhat.

Look here at the Skylake die:



If they remove the iGPU they clearly have room for 4 more CPU cores. They could also scale back the iGPU and have room for 2 additional cores.