14 DAY TRIAL // It seems that the most affordable Skylake models are entering stores. Although not at first in the Western world, the new Pentium G4500T has arrived in Tokyo stores, in Japan. Undoubtedly, it will arrive soon in other parts of the world as well.
Awaited for some time, the non-enthusiast versions of the Skylake processors have been missing from the store shelves for a month or two. Now it seems more Intel CPU models based on the Skylake architecture are present in stores, and weirdly enough these are not in China or US, but Japan.
The new low-cost, eco-friendly Intel Pentium G4500T is a dual-core processor that comes without Hyper-Threading technology and runs at 3.00GHz with 3MB last level cache, offering the standard dual-channel DDR3L/DDR4 memory controller while bringing the already standard Intel HD Graphics 530 graphics adapter.
Just like its bigger "K" brothers, the new CPU is made using the 14nm process technology, having 35W thermal design power and needs the already famous LGA1151 packaging.
Less TDP and Turbo power in the low-end Skylakes compared to previous Haswells
The new design is more than welcomed for users of home computers or office PCs that do not need the computing power of a much more powerful Core i5-6400, i5-6500 and i7-6700T that come with extra 100 and 200 MHz.
In our previous coverage of the new desktop lineup from Intel, we observed that Intel decided to replace the "S" suffix from the most powerful, non-enthusiast oriented CPUs with the "T" letter. Weirdly enough, the "Turbo" feature that some of the new "T" models come with has now 100 MHz - 300 MHz lower maximum Turbo frequencies, and 28% - 33% lower TDP than their Haswell and Broadwell predecessors.
The reason why Intel decided to do this is either to help CPUs become more eco-friendly, which may be a subject of interest for casual Intel customers, while keeping the thermal design power unhinged and providing maximum performance on the enthusiast-oriented "K" models, since consumers of these CPUs don't really care about eco-friendliness.
This would also help Intel sell the high-end "K" models more if users want Haswell-type performance since the prices between old- and new-gen Intel architectures are still the same in retails.
Apparently, the new Pentium G4500T is currently available in store in Akihabara shopping district in Japan and Akiba PC reports it costs about ¥10300 ($86).