I’m surprised that Intel haven’t taken a page from AMD’s book, being “when they go high, you go low” (and vice versa). Yes, Intel are in trouble with regard to their higher-end products (though I don’t think I’ve heard anything about their Xeon lines being affected by their Raptor Lake problems), but what I really don’t get is that when I look at their low-end processors, it’s like they’ve got their priorities all out of whack. I understand that low-end CPUs aren’t going to fix Intel’s problems, but when AMD was being trounced by Intel (ie. in AMD’s FX + FMx socket era), they put a load of processors out that were very cheap and at least *sold for something*.
In my average user PC builds in recent years I’ve been going for for processors like the 2200G/3200G/4300G (even if lower end AM4 APUs were available). In years past, I would have expected to see Athlons, Celerons, Pentiums and i3s all competing at the same time, but for some reason this is all I can see from Intel:
Intel Core i3-12100F (4c 8t no integrated graphics so it’s a total non-starter in a basic usage system given the price of GPUs): £66.99
Intel Core i3-14100F (4c 8t no igpu, slightly cheaper than the 4300G): £83.99
AMD Ryzen 3 4300G (4c 8t): £88.99
Intel Processor 300 (2c 4t, nearly a tenner more expensive than the 4300G): £95.99
(edited this because my supplier lists it as 2c 2t but Intel and TPU list it as 2c 4t)
… some more Intel cpus with no igpu …
AMD Ryzen 7 5700G (8c 16t): £139.99
Intel i3-12100 (finally! 4c 8t with igpu): £140.99
Another supplier’s cheapest Intel CPU + iGPU is:
Intel Core i5-12600K: £169.26
If it wasn’t for the “Intel Processor 300”, then I would have assumed that both AMD and Intel have completely abandoned their Celeron / Pentium / Athlon product lines because there’s just no money in it any more (understandable given that most average people probably think a laptop/tablet is a better choice). Perhaps the 300 is just sitting there with tonnes of unused inventory, but surely Intel would have slashed the price by now?
I just don’t understand why Intel basically abandoned competing with AMD at product points that clearly are profitable for AMD to produce something at, and there are plenty of people/companies out there who would buy an Intel CPU even if the Ryzen equivalent is *a bit* better, all Intel has to do is show up? Let alone bringing a 2c/2t to a 4c/8t gunfight or 4c/8t to an 8c/16t gunfight.
When I was mainly building Intel iGPU basic PCs, the Pentium for a good long time was my minimum recommendation just because it could do the job tolerably and was a good bit cheaper than the i3. These days I think it’s utter madness to go for anything less than 4c (ignoring atom-type stuff) on a new PC what with Win11’s needs, but my overall point is there used to be some choice, practically speaking!