Intel are reportedly limiting Pentium G4560 CPU production to improve i3 sales

Intel is allegedly limiting the production of the Pentium G4560 to boost i3 sales

A report from Digiworthy has claimed that Intel is limiting the production of their Pentium G4560 in order to increase retail pricing and boost the sales of their more expensive i3 CPU models. 

With Kaby Lake, Intel increased the performance of their Pentium line of CPUs by enabling hyperthreading, which allows the CPUs to offer 4 total CPU threads. Alongside this upgrade Intel also allowed these CPUs to have 3MB of L3 cache, instead of the 2MB that was available on previous models. 

These upgrades have made these processors Intel’s best bang/buck gaming CPU, given the reliance of modern games on a minimum of 4 total threads. With these modern Pentiums also offering clock speeds of 3.5GHz, these CPUs also offer decent levels of single-threaded performance, which is very useful for gaming applications. 

With this in mind, Intel’s i3 series of CPUs seem like terrible value by comparison, with the changes in capabilities offering only a minimal performance boost while gaming, with all i3 models except the i3 7350K coming without support for overclocking. 

  

 

With the Pentium G4560 costing £64.99 and the i3 7100 costing £109.99, it is easy to see why budget gamers are opting for the Pentium, with users requiring a £45 price increase for a mere 400MHz increase in CPU clock speeds.     

The main differentiating factor between modern Pentium CPUs and Intel’s i3 series of CPUs is a lack of support for the AVX2 instruction set, which comes in handy when handling video editing and transcoding workloads. These instructions are not used in gaming very often, which allows Kaby Lake Pentiums to offers a lot of value to budget gamers. 

 

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