Intel Broadwell "C" and "R" processor sampling policy

[Rys]

@CarstenS it strikes me as really odd that Intel have launched a new enthusiast-class processor, even if the focus is more on the IGP than the CPU performance, yet haven't sampled the press. A small number of sites, including yours, appear to have obtained samples somehow.

While that's not strange in and of itself, since obviously ES chips are released early for testing purposes and sometimes they make their way to sites like yours, it does seem strange to me that Intel didn't do any active sampling themselves.

Do you have any view as to what Intel's approach is this time around? I'd love to read about the processor now it's officially out, but I don't want to do so with Anandtech as my only English language source. Sadly my German, and Google's translated German, isn't enough for me to extract the nuance I need from PCGH.

 

[CarstenS]

I can only speculate about Intels reasons. The „R“ models are BGA ones soldered down, so you'd need to turn to partner manufacturers for that anyway. But for the „C“-models, I have no clue. Usually (not necessarily only at Intel though), a more restrictive sampling policy is used when there's something to hide. Apart from not very promising clock rates in the C-models, I cannot see that with Broadwell though. True, most innovation apart from the more or less user-transparent manufacturing process, concentrates around the integrated graphics. Maybe Intel thought that would be a bit hard to market in a 400 dollar processor.

When they did not even sample after the computex launch I was thinking that with the large delay until retail availability, they will see this only as a very short term intermediate product until Sky Lake arrives in Q3.
Another (rather sad) aspect: There's basically no competition from AMD in the end user CPU market above ~170 Euro.
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That said, I've only seen this thread here today, so in the meantime there should be other review sites having their tests (probably with retail models) up.