Why Intel Created The C232 And C236 Workstation Chipsets

[logainofhades]

"Why Intel Created The C232 And C236 Workstation Chipsets"
TL;DR "greed".

lol more like common sense. considering Xenon is supposed to be for business workstations and servers and not for the noob gamers out there who thinks xenon CPU's will be better then a core I7 to play call of duty something or other with

For the money they are better. 1230v5 is the same clock speed, as an i7 6700, but is $80-$100 less. On what planet does IGP, of the 6700, make it worth that much more?

 

[firefoxx04]

Meanwhile AMD supports ECC on all of their chipsets (at least they used to).

My Phenom II + AM3+ chipset are both fully capable of ECC. I wish I could have went intel for my cheep ZFS build but I cant without going server board + xeon.

 

[Aurunemaru]

No cheaper i7 with useless igp anymore?
great, i'm waiting for zen before getting a new CPU

 

[thor220]

Sounds like the announced C232 boards are a waste of time. Getting tired of waiting on Intel to get their act together. Skylake's launch has been a disaster.

More than a disaster actually. With the news that Skylake and xeons based on skylake will only work on windows 10 after 18 months, I'm sure that many businesses will stay away. If Intel didn't have a monopoly, that would be money flying out the window.

 

[chaosmassive]

now, I am seriously hope that Zen become alternative for Intel, if not then we all milked by Intel for very long time....

 

[hst101rox]

They are supposed to last longer than the core versions of the CPU? They last basically forever anyway at 90C but more life is better I'm sure. I wonder if the Xeons will come out of the box with the intensive computation bug fix, or will require updated BIOS on those chipsets.

 

[mapesdhs]

Hate to say it but the article reads like Intel is bringing out these chipsets and restricting XEON use because of its own supply problems.

 

[logainofhades]

Hate to say it but the article reads like Intel is bringing out these chipsets and restricting XEON use because of its own supply problems.

I believe that is part of the problem, as well.

 

[blazorthon]

Funny thing is that unless these boards are much more expensive, going for the Xeon will probably still be cheaper and have better supply in the short term.

 

[IInuyasha74]

Funny thing is that unless these boards are much more expensive, going for the Xeon will probably still be cheaper and have better supply in the short term.

That might ultimately be true, but Xeon and its associated motherboards were scheduled to ship later than most of the Core products and consumer boards. So if it was the supply problem that Intel was wanting to alleviate then staggering the release like this might do it. Xeon products are starting to show up on the market, but there aren't a lot of options yet.

 

[logainofhades]

That is the problem, lack of motherboards. Some manufacturers have announced boards, but none of those have been seen out in retail. The more I think about it, the more I think I may just keep what I have.

 

[stevenrix]

The C232 chipset does not support VT. This is a dealbreaker for me.
In my lab I run a windows 2012R2 datacenter on a NUC and I use a few Core I7 for virtualization. At work, I only work with Xeons and Tbs of RAM
There is a market for people that want to run tiny systems for testing/lab and want to save money with their own home servers.

 

[RedJaron]

I think the C232 chipset is getting sold short. Yes, it lacks VT-d, which stings a little. However you're getting both RAID and SLI/CFX support on what otherwise is a B150 board. The only other chipset that has both of those features is Z170/C236. I know a lot of people that went for H87/97 over cheaper B85 because the B boards don't have RAID. If the 232 boards are priced right, that could be a cheaper RAID box alternative.

 

[IInuyasha74]

RedJaron makes some good points. Probably would do well as small server/database board or if you are needing a few GPUs for compute work. It just a bit like the H110 board, has a lot of pros and cons that need considered.

 

[iamacow]

Sounds like the announced C232 boards are a waste of time. Getting tired of waiting on Intel to get their act together. Skylake's launch has been a disaster.

More than a disaster actually. With the news that Skylake and xeons based on skylake will only work on windows 10 after 18 months, I'm sure that many businesses will stay away. If Intel didn't have a monopoly, that would be money flying out the window.

whaaa? I duno where that info came from. Why would M$ restrict intel chips? they wouldn't...

 

[IInuyasha74]

Sounds like the announced C232 boards are a waste of time. Getting tired of waiting on Intel to get their act together. Skylake's launch has been a disaster.

More than a disaster actually. With the news that Skylake and xeons based on skylake will only work on windows 10 after 18 months, I'm sure that many businesses will stay away. If Intel didn't have a monopoly, that would be money flying out the window.

whaaa? I duno where that info came from. Why would M$ restrict intel chips? they wouldn't...

Not only would they, they did.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-processor-support-policy,31024.html

 

[iamacow]

oh crazy

 

[mapesdhs]

oh crazy

Welcome to the modern MS (ie. same as the old MS, they just give less of a hoot about what people think now). See:

http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/11/02/microsoft-confirms-unstoppable-windows-10-tracking/
http://www.forbes.com/sites/gordonkelly/2015/10/30/windows-10-upgrades-now-automatic/

 

[Caanis Lupus]

Not only would they, they did.
http://www.tomshardware.com/news/microsoft-processor-support-policy,31024.html

To me it sounds like Window 7 computers are not going to just stop working on Skylake based systems in 18 months... They are not going to optimize/update drivers any further. Will this drive Windows 7/Skylake systems to be more problematic? Maybe. Force PC gamers to adopt Windows 10 to support new hardware.

Wonder if they are making a similar plan for Windows 2008(R2)

To me it seems they want the "old and busted" to run like old and busted to motivate adoption of Windows 10. I am guessing this may be partially in response to the dismal adoption rate of Windows 8/8.1 and how embedded the XP to Windows 7 users had become.

Just my option/observation and unfortunately I did not stay at a Holiday Inn either.

 

[logainofhades]

Gamers are probably going to want to make the switch for DX12, as Win 10 is the only way to get it.

 

[RobertFontaine]

A whole lot of meh.

Hopefully data centres will be forced onto these by their service contracts and push the v3 prices down. Skylake seems like a fairly unimportant revision other than as another small step forward by Intel. Lots of big things in the works for memory and bandwidth but they didn't make it into this chips et.

 

[logainofhades]

Intel isn't known to lower prices. The v3 prices really are not that bad. A 1231v3 is still a good deal cheaper than its i7 counterparts, and less than $25 more than a 4690k.

 

[turkey3_scratch]

Even though it's not a "refresh", this is never a bad deal:

PCPartPicker part list / Price breakdown by merchant

CPU: Intel Xeon E3-1220 V3 3.1GHz Quad-Core Processor ($195.99 @ SuperBiiz)
Total: $195.99
Prices include shipping, taxes, and discounts when available
Generated by PCPartPicker 2016-01-26 19:17 EST-0500

 

[RedJaron]

I think you mean the 1230. The 1220 is a more expensive i5-4460 with a bigger L3 and ECC RAM support. The 1230 and 1231 are the baby i7 chips for $100 less.

 

[bit_user]

People should have been able to figure out for themselves that Intel was just trying to squeeze more cash out of their customers and so making a lengthy article to explain something that could be summarized as "intel wanted more money" would make little sense.

It's safe to assume at least some people went into this article expecting to hear an explanation involving a manufacturing incompatibility between Xeon's and consumer chipsets which would be a reasonable motive for introducing a change in policy that is a complete reversal of their last two processor iterations.

Perhaps you're unaware of this, but it's standard industry practice to artificially segregate markets by disabling certain features and adding constraints so they can sell them at a lower price point.

Intel probably has about one manufacturing line for every 10 or 20 SKUs. The parts are then binned and features are fused on or off. Not to single out Intel, though - it's rampant throughout the industry. Everyone does this "to squeeze more cash out of their customers".

Anyway, I think the reason the article doesn't just say this in the first sentence is that it's speculation. The author builds his case for the allegation, because to do otherwise would be irresponsible journalism, when the claim isn't verifiable.

Instead they got a wall of text that is summarized as: "Intel thought people were getting too good a deal with Xeon's and so implemented a barrier to keep them out of inexpensive performance builds"

This article is nothing but click bait and imparts no insight or knowledge that'd make it worth a read.

Hence my TL;DR is really all anyone needs to read to know the entirety of the information contained within this article and not feel like they wasted several minutes of their life.

The article had plenty of useful detail, for anyone with interest in workstation/server boards & chipsets. I actually thought it over-emphasized the point about incompatibility, but it was a fair thing to highlight and certainly the most significant point mentioned.

If it took you several minutes to figure out that the article contained details not relevant to your interests and to find the answer to the question posed by the headline, then you have my sympathies.