Quote (So when you think about it, it may be in the case of recycling of old Coffee Lake CPUs from the previous year) So Intel have old stock that they can not sell at the new inflated prices that were jacked up because of shortages and manufacturing issues. Like I said last year complete BS and just price fixing.

shamus21:

Quote (So when you think about it, it may be in the case of recycling of old Coffee Lake CPUs from the previous year) So Intel have old stock that they can not sell at the new inflated prices that were jacked up because of shortages and manufacturing issues. Like I said last year complete BS and just price fixing.

Thats just wild speculation though. I'm sure they are fully capable of making new CPUs and just not soldering them. 🙂 Since this seems to be strongly refering to the "F" variant, was the i5-9400 even soldered? I figured this was reserved for OC capable CPUs, ie. "K" variants, since non-OC CPUs really don't care that much.

These must be the old processors they put away to create that artificial shortage and now prices are ripe to sell them.

Intel and their shenanigans in a desperate attempt to rid of old inventory, business as usual

I'm always in line to board the Intel Hate Train, but I don't see the problem with this at all. This CPU doesn't need to be soldered. Its base clock is 2.9GHz and its max turbo is 4.1GHz, and I don't think you can overclock this. Thermal paste will get the job done just fine. Indium (the "active ingredient" in IHS solder) is a very rare and expensive metal, so if I were Intel I'd make the same decision. As for this being a rebranded 8 series, so what? Intel's architecture hasn't had any noteworthy changes since Skylake, and even then, that was basically just a die shrink of Broadwell with DDR4 support. If there was an actual difference between the 8th and 9th gens then sure, there might be a good reason to care, but the real problem that people should be complaining about is the total lack of innovation from Intel.

schmidtbag:

Indium (the "active ingredient" in IHS solder) is a very rare and expensive metal, so if I were Intel I'd make the same decision.

Yeah. Intel would rather use Intelium, which is the cheapest toothpaste they can buy from any manufacturer, relabeled. Although they try to avoid the ones that create stripes.

schmidtbag:

the real problem that people should be complaining about is the total lack of innovation from Intel.

Unfortunately we all know where the innovation is stuck. They put all their eggs into Ice Lake, and that was built for 10nm, which didn't get out the door. Micro-Architecture and Process are way too closely interwoven at this point, unfortunately. In some recent interviews Intel engineers did say that they are trying to split the micro-architecture and process again for future designs, so that hopefully such a situation doesn't happen again, where they are stuck waiting on a process. The time it takes to develop a new micro-architecture is just too long for Intel to react and build another one on 14nm, although some people did wonder why they didn't try to port Ice Lake to 14nm, but maybe that wasn't feasible for the design. Anyhow at this point we can only hope that Ice Lake/10nm actually releases by 2020, and isn't delayed further again.

If 9700F would have retail price of 300 euro comparing to 2700, it would be very popular. But at 430 euro it's not a player at all.