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

Posted by timothy on Monday March 18, 2013 @08:50AM 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).

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wtf? fma3? by convolvatron · 2013-03-18 09:22 · Score: 1, Offtopic

could someone tell me how many separate instruction sets, pipelines and register files I
get in a mainline CPU these days? i turned away for a second and completely lost track.
what happens with the 10 that you aren't using? just sitting there reducing the yield?