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).

Comments

Re:Hope it's going in the new Mac Pro

[semi-extrinsic]

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.