Intel Releases Statement on Bent Skylake CPUs

[vibranium]

 

Intel has released an official statement about the bending Skylake processor issue that has come to light here recently. Intel isn’t saying much as they won’t comment on 3rd party CPU cooler designs and are standing by their recommendations for cooler designs.

 

"The design specifications and guidelines for the 6^th Gen Intel Core processor using the LGA 1151 socket are unchanged from previous generations and are available for partners and 3^rd party manufacturers. Intel can’t comment on 3^rd party designs or their adherence to the recommended design specifications. For questions about a specific cooling product we must defer to the manufacturer."

 

Source

 

 

Comment: in other words, Intel is saying, if you stick to design pressure, the CPU should not bend. All bending is caused by excessive pressure, and is not our problem.

[DKT27]

They should have not modified the size of the CPU board or whatever it is, in the first place.

[vibranium]

Yeah, I am not convinced by Intel's statement that the thinner PCB has the same spec for pressure.

[DKT27]

Me neither.

 

Here is some information from Anandtech:

 

Quote

 

Skylake also has a substantially thinner package than Devil's Canyon:

 

According to PCWatch, the package thickness of the Core i7-4770K is 1.1mm, compared to 0.8mm for Skylake. This is a direct result of using fewer PCB layers, and here we count five for Skylake and eight for Haswell.

 

There could be several reasons for this. The removal of the fully integrated voltage regulator (FIVR) might reduce the number of PCB layers for power planes. The nature of the 14nm die might facilitate a thinner package as well. The cynical answer is that it is used to drive down cost. In the motherboard industry, a PCB with more layers is substantially more expensive but simplifies design when there are more features - there's also a side argument if more layers or fewer layers is better for overclocking. If we transplant this thinking to the processor, it becomes a balance of cost vs. complexity. Either way, the retail price of the processor is still relatively consistent with the previous iterations. Another thought to add to the mix would be if Intel has plans in the works to launch higher end processors based on Skylake (Kaby Lake?) in the future. The slight change in Intel's processor naming scheme (4770K to 6700K, as in 70K to 00K) also points to the potential move later in the lifetime of the product. The only hint in the naming scheme from Intel is that the 'processor numbering reflects that these processors belong to the 6th Gen Intel Core family'.

 

The thinness of the package has implications for removing the lid/heatspreader of the processor as well. Splave notes that previous heatspreader methods involving force, such as vices that were common during Haswell's tenure, may not be appropriate due to the thinness of Skylake. Splave shows an image of a failed attempt by another user on a Skylake CPU:

 

Instead, a razor method (and something warm such as a hairdryer or the bean bags that iFixit uses to warm up glue in smartphones to take them apart) to cut through the black adhesive between the package and the IHS is suggested and it what was used for the CPU above. As there are no FIVR resistors to worry about on the top of the package, the first resistance a razor blade will encounter after the black adhesive is the silicon die itself. All that being said, over at PCWatch they successfully have used a vice method.

 

Interestingly the heatspreader for Skylake is heavier than that from Haswell by nearly 20%, moving up from 22g to 26g. Given the copper mass that usually sits on a high end processor this should not matter much, although basic aluminium coolers might see a small benefit here by virtue of the minor extra mass. This might also just be that the mounting requirements for Haswell and Skylake are the same, and the extra mass comes from the added z-height required to maintain the mounting as before. 

 

So why are we talking about removing the heatspreader? Back with Haswell (as well as Ivy Bridge to a degree), it was discovered that the thermal interface material between the silicon die and the heatspreader was both an insufficient amount and lower quality than previous generations, as well as the heatspreader being far away from the CPU due to the black adhesive, causing more air bubbles and poorer heat transfer than is optimal. For a stock processor, this difference has little effect to the use of the system, but for overclockers it meant that they were more thermally limited than silicon limited with their overclocking.

 

Devil's Canyon changed that - here was a better binned Haswell processor with a higher quality package, giving a ten degrees cooler system at load. It is worth noting that previously on certain platforms Intel had been providing a mixed metal interface (generalized as a soldered interface) between the silicon and the heatspreader, which is the best but most expensive option. If the cost of the interface is reduced by 0.1 cents, then that's a significant saving on millions of processors. Devil's Canyon was a small subset of sales, so spending that extra for that specific crowd could be seen as beneficial to Intel's perspective by overclockers.

 

To paraphrase Splave again, he comments that the thermal paste (TIM)o n his Skylake is certainly worse than that of Devil's Canyon. If the extra mass on the IHS is coming from a taller heatspreader (by virtue of the smaller package substrate), then more TIM is needed otherwise there will be substantial air bubbling of the TIM between the CPU and the heatspreader. By replacing his own thermal paste and resecuring the heatspreader, he saw an 18°C drop in temperatures at his highest air overclock with the old paste (5.1 GHz at 1.48 volts) - from 96ºC that overheated to 78ºC on the warmest core. An 18°C drop is immense. Under those conditions, and based on rough testing not published in our Skylake review, it could equal another 100-400 MHz depending on the quality of the processor. PCWatch confirms that switching out the paste with CoolLaboratory’s Liquid Pro (a liquid metal adhesion interface) reduced temperatures at 4.6 GHz from 88ºC to 68ºC

 

This throws up some questions - is this just a result of design decisions for cost, or is there a Devil's Canyon type processor coming later in the design cycle?

 

 

Source

 

The original article is worth reading, with all the images.

 

What this means to me is that Intel seems to be in cost saving mode. That, at the cost of product quality and user satisfaction I think.