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Next-Gen Intel Chip Brings Big Gains For Floating-Point Apps
An anonymous reader writes "Tom's Hardware has published a lengthy article and a set of benchmarks on the new "Haswell" CPUs from Intel. It's just a performance preview, but it isn't just more of the same. While it's got the expected 10-15% faster for the same clock speed for integer applications, floating point applications are almost twice as a fast which might be important for digital imaging applications and scientific computing."
The serious performance increase has a few caveats: you have to use either AVX2 or FMA3, and then only in code that takes advantage of vectorization. Floating point operations using AVX or plain old SSE3 see more modest increases in performance (in line with integer performance increases).
Do you really need a Mac for that? If not, it seems you're limiting your potential by having to wait for the holy artifacts to be released.
The good thing about manufacturers speeding up SSE/AVX/etc. is that the linear algebra libraries (specifically the ATLAS implementation of BLAS and LAPACK) usually release code that makes use of the new hawtness in about six months after release. Do you know how much software relies on BLAS and LAPACK for speed?
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Would that improve hashing speeds in, say, Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is based on SHA256 hashing, which has zero floating point operations. So no, this will not impact Bitcoin mining at all.
Erm -- ECC memory is slower than non-ECC memory, I think.
Tubal-Cain smokes the white owl.
AMD already has FMA3. They also published great results. Of course nobody read it, at least I have seen mentioned it in the usual generic benchmark articles people like to refer (which does not use FMA3).