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Next-Gen Intel Chip Brings Big Gains For Floating-Point Apps

Posted by timothy on from the code-slower dept.

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).

5 of 176 comments (clear)

  1. Hope it's going in the new Mac Pro by GlobalEcho · · Score: 3, Interesting

    I hope there's really a new Mac Pro coming and that it has these chips in it! I do a heck of a lot of PDE solving, statistics and simulations, and would love to have a screamin' machine again.

    1. Re:Hope it's going in the new Mac Pro by semi-extrinsic · · Score: 5, Interesting

      If you're doing numerics, what the fuck (if you'll pardon my French) are you doing buying Apple? I'm working on two-phase Navier-Stokes solvers myself, and I just bought a new rig consisting of 3 boxes each with a Intel Core i7 @ 3.7 GHz, 12 GB RAM, an SSD drive and a big-ass cooling system. In total that cost less than the Mac Pro with a single Core i7 @ 3.3 GHz listed in that article.You're paying 3x more than you should, and you get what extra? A shiny case? Puh-lease.

      --
      for i in `facebook friends "=bday" 2>/dev/null | cut -d " " -f 3-`; do facebook wallpost $i "Happy birthday!"; done
    2. Re:Hope it's going in the new Mac Pro by spire3661 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Why not just do that on real workstation hardware and tap into it remotely?

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      Good-bye
  2. Might be important, but probably not... by MasseKid · · Score: 4, Interesting

    For problems where you need floating point AND is not multithread friendly AND need large computing power AND is specially coded, then this will be of great use. However, most massive computing problems like this are multi-thread friendly and this will still be roughly an order of magnitude from the speeds you can get by using a GPU.

  3. GT3 by edxwelch · · Score: 3, Interesting

    AMD has lost the CPU race a long time ago, but still beats Intel with integrated graphics. Now, It looks like Haswell could win that battle too.
    The article shows GT2 to be 15% - 50% faster than the old HD4000. That's still a bit slower than Trinity, but GT3 has double the execution units than GT2, potentially blowing anything away that AMD could offer.