It doesn't make sense to me that Intel would do this just to save a nickel, unless solder is way more costly than I imagine. I'd like to know if some other aspect of production makes paste more desirable.
The only Ivy Bridge chips that are out are engineering samples. It's good that people are bringing it up, but this is likely just a beta thing. Maybe they wanted to be able to remove the IHS...or maybe they didn't want people to know the final overclocked performance characteristics for some reason.
What does engineering sample mean? I could go to Microcenter right now and buy a Core i5 3570K right now if I wanted to. Are they selling engineering samples? That seems like a somewhat shady move.
The first Ivy Bridge consumer chips are just hitting retailers today (NewEgg just put them on sale ten hours ago). All of the experiments done so far have been on review chips sent out some weeks ago.
It means pre-production, or beta. No, Microcenter is not selling engineering samples..the production chips _just_ became available. I suspect we'll see a new round of testing today/tomorrow that'll hopefully shed more light on this.
Why not? The harm is to heat dissipation at high clock rates and voltages -- basically to overclockers. The targeted clocks at the performance points they are aiming at don't have any trouble staying in reasonable temperature ranges, so why bother?
Lots of this is market based, not technical. The only competitors to Ivy Bridge are from AMD, and frankly don't compete well. There's simply no pressure to produce a "pull out all the stops" max performance chip. They have a comfortable margin even with comparatively poor heat sink designs, so they might as well save the nickel.
I could also be that (if true) using the paste could meet their engineering/temperature requirements and using solder to conduct the heat was overkill. In this case, the only ones that would feel the pinch would be those that overclocked the chips.
The biggest problem I'd imagine with the direct-soldered die is that it's a much more rigid interface, which means any localised heating is going to put much more mechanical strain on the die.
In contrast, the TIM is much more flexible, and the reduced heat transfer might actually work in its favour, by buffering sudden thermal spikes to reduce the cross-die gradient (and thus stress).
Comments
It doesn't make sense to me that Intel would do this just to save a nickel, unless solder is way more costly than I imagine. I'd like to know if some other aspect of production makes paste more desirable.
The only Ivy Bridge chips that are out are engineering samples. It's good that people are bringing it up, but this is likely just a beta thing. Maybe they wanted to be able to remove the IHS...or maybe they didn't want people to know the final overclocked performance characteristics for some reason.
What does engineering sample mean? I could go to Microcenter right now and buy a Core i5 3570K right now if I wanted to. Are they selling engineering samples? That seems like a somewhat shady move.
The first Ivy Bridge consumer chips are just hitting retailers today (NewEgg just put them on sale ten hours ago). All of the experiments done so far have been on review chips sent out some weeks ago.
It means pre-production, or beta. No, Microcenter is not selling engineering samples..the production chips _just_ became available. I suspect we'll see a new round of testing today/tomorrow that'll hopefully shed more light on this.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Engineering_sample
Why not? The harm is to heat dissipation at high clock rates and voltages -- basically to overclockers. The targeted clocks at the performance points they are aiming at don't have any trouble staying in reasonable temperature ranges, so why bother?
Lots of this is market based, not technical. The only competitors to Ivy Bridge are from AMD, and frankly don't compete well. There's simply no pressure to produce a "pull out all the stops" max performance chip. They have a comfortable margin even with comparatively poor heat sink designs, so they might as well save the nickel.
I could also be that (if true) using the paste could meet their engineering/temperature requirements and using solder to conduct the heat was overkill. In this case, the only ones that would feel the pinch would be those that overclocked the chips.
The biggest problem I'd imagine with the direct-soldered die is that it's a much more rigid interface, which means any localised heating is going to put much more mechanical strain on the die.
In contrast, the TIM is much more flexible, and the reduced heat transfer might actually work in its favour, by buffering sudden thermal spikes to reduce the cross-die gradient (and thus stress).