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

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.