Easily done if the clocks are kept very low.

"Coffee Lake"?! :P

Increasing mainstream core count has been extremely difficult for Intel. Otherwise we wouldn't have had a decade of quad-cores. Although not even all i7 laptop CPUs have been quad-cores, so I guess a mainstream laptop CPU for Intel has been a dual-core. Easily done? Not if you study the history.

Increasing mainstream core count has been extremely difficult for Intel. Otherwise we wouldn't have had a decade of quad-cores. Although not even all i7 laptop CPUs have been quad-cores, so I guess a mainstream laptop CPU for Intel has been a dual-core. Easily done? Not if you study the history.

Huh, what are you on about? Multicore processors with higher core counts than 4 have all been Xeons. Hence the same pin layout.

not so, intel have intentionaly locked mainstream architecture to quad since years, sock 1056, 1055, 1050 etc... it's on socket spec!!

Intel writes those socket specs itself, so that means nothing. They have a pretty good time writing them as well, changing the socket almost as often as they can.

Increasing mainstream core count has been extremely difficult for Intel. Otherwise we wouldn't have had a decade of quad-cores. Although not even all i7 laptop CPUs have been quad-cores, so I guess a mainstream laptop CPU for Intel has been a dual-core. Easily done? Not if you study the history.

I hope they will be priced as mainstream if they go mainstream. 400-500 euros is not a mainstream price. They should be priced at 300-350 euros if they are to be called mainstream. But this is Intel so we don't know what excuse they will find to price them high again.

I'm curious, what would you guys expect an i7 - 6 core part to be priced at? What would you expect a 4 core to be priced at?

In a market with actual competition, lower than a current i7. A Skylake i7 has 1.75B transistors. Fiji has 8.9 billion. Even if Intel's transistors at 14nm have 200% the cost of production of the 28nm node (and they don't, the main reason being that they economize on waffers so much), a $300 GPU of today, with 4GB of HBM on top of it, a massive cooling and power delivery system, with almost 5x the transistor count, profitably sells for $40 less than that i7. The current pricing is simple gouging from Intel.

I guess I'm not so much talking about the maximum price, but the difference between a Quad and Six core. Like, if I was to buy an Intel processor right now, the difference between a 6700K and a 6800K is $100 -- but I wouldn't pay it. I don't think the two extra cores are worth $100, in fact ignoring motherboard pricing/pci-e lanes for a minute, I don't even think the platform is worth $100 more. So let's say a 6 core comes in at $340 and Intel puts a quad at $240. Even as a gamer, I'd personally buy the quad, given that everything else about them is the same. In terms of general computing -- the two cores would be worth even less - especially if the clock speed of the 6 core is lower. So either Intel would have to seriously limit functionality of the quad, or they'd have to sell the 6 core at only slightly above quad prices. And obviously this is my opinion, some people might feel that the performance increase the 6 cores offers in some games is worth it -- but I think in general, ignoring gaming, it's tough to price that.

Considering the fact that 90% of computer users don't run software that even if properly threaded, would benefit from a higher core count at lower clock speeds. If you plan on running highly specialized software that has actual benefit from high core counts, then you're not what intel thinks about when making consumer processors. Go buy a Xeon.

Of course you have the R&D costs on top, but even so, we could have had some ballpark figures. Even the duopoly we have on GPUs has reached ridiculous levels (see 1070/1080 pricing compared to what they pack), but Intel CPUs are on another level.