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Intel Haswell CPUs Debut, Put To the Test
jjslash writes "Intel's Haswell architecture is finally available in the flagship Core i7-4770K and Core i7-4950HQ processors. This is a very volatile time for Intel. In an ARM-less vacuum, Intel's Haswell architecture would likely be the most amazing thing to happen to the tech industry in years. Haswell mobile processors are slated to bring about the single largest improvement in battery life in Intel history. In graphics, Haswell completely redefines the expectations for processor graphics. On the desktop however, Haswell is just a bit more efficient, but no longer much faster when going from one generation to another." Reader wesbascas puts some numbers on what "just a bit" means here: "Just as leaked copies of the chip have already shown, the i7-4770K only presents an incremental ~10% performance increase over the Ivy Bridge-based Core i7-3770K. Overclocking potential also remains in the same 4.3 GHz to 4.6 GHz ballpark."
For me, this is by far the biggest architectural improvement I see in these line of processors (check http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Transactional_Synchronization_Extensions and http://software.intel.com/sites/default/files/m/9/2/3/41604 for more information). If it sticks, it will help solving a lot of multi-core shared memory software development issues.
Hmm, Performance per Watt seems to have been glazed over.
The possibility of a fanless media center PC, the ability of a server farm to eliminate over half the cooling cost, and long battery life in a gaming class laptop seems to not be the attention of the article.
Gee it's only X percent faster..
The truth shall set you free!
The lack of phenomenal hardware improvements may annoy the nerds, but the mass market PC is killed by the abysmal software environment. People are fleeing to tablets and phones and with that the cloud because maintaining a PC has become just about impossible for laymen. The slowness of a desktop that hasn't seen professional maintenance is astonishing, if it is still working at all. Viruses and trojans aside, every bit of software comes with its own updater, many of which are poorly implemented resource and attention hogs. If the updater doesn't do you in, it's the bundled adware, sometimes installed by the update "service". The PC is stiff and stone cold, a host overwhelmed and killed by its parasites. Time to put it 6ft underground.
You'll need the electricity savings to offset the absurd cost of the MacBook Air.
If it saves you $50 in electricity per month over your present system, all other factors being equal, in 3 and a half years you'll be saving money. People don't buy luxury to save money. Relevant car analogy, not a single 2013 Ferrari model gets 20 MPG or better. By contrast, most Kia vehicles get 30 MPG or better.
The moral of this story? Poor people care about economy, wealthy people care about performance, and business people look for a happy medium.
In the last few years, Intel has been adding new instructions that will give major performance gains when they are used. For example, Haswell can do two fused multiply-adds with four double or eight single precision operands per cycle per core, but no current code will use this. We'll get the advantage when HPC code is recompiled (in a few months time), and when general code assumes that everyone has this feature (in five years time). But on the other hand, we _now_ get the advantages of features they added five years ago.
Intel for a little while has correctly perceived that their risk to business is from shift in computing to mobile devices and they are addressing this issue. One thing Intel has always been very good at, and I'm a great admirer of them for that, when they perceive a risk, they are extremely good at steering their giant ship very rapidly into the headwind and tackle that threat. Their process technology lead also gives them a huge advantage.
Over the next couple of years, the battle front will be the mobile and server devices, the desktop processors will become a second class citizen. Maybe this will give some lifeline to AMD, but AMD is so far behind on performance.
While I am all for advances in CPUs, I seriously wish Intel would go back to a naming scheme for its CPUs that made any kind of sense to the average buyer (or even the technically-oriented buyer). I have grown really weary of having to look at tables of CPU specifications every time I shop around for computers.
Intel's naming scheme -- expecially in recent years -- has been a mishmash of names and numbers without any obvious coherence. Get a clue Intel. You're hurting your own market.
If I didn't have to run OS X in my business, I'd buy AMD just for that reason. Their desktop CPUs may not be quite up to the latest Intel, but they are certainly adequate and the price is better.
Wrong. We discuss it. But when we start talking about price you people go back to this. Exactly this.
The i7-4770 costs 4+ times as much (currently if you pre-order) as the most expensive AMD A10 chip, which also arent even the fastest AMD chips available.
i7 4770k –$339
A10 5800k - $129.99
So we're looking at a chip that's 2.6 times the price, but 4 times the CPU performance.
Price was brought up, so you responded by not mentioning price at all, and proceeded to compare the highest performing Intel chip ever with a mid-range AMD part.
No, the assertion that the intel chip was 4 times more expensive was brought up, and neglected to mention the context that the intel chip was also 4 times faster (and also greatly exaggerated the 2.6 times price). I merely noted that there's a reason for the intel chip being significantly more expensive – that it's significantly faster.
You're right, the AMD chip is indeed a mid range chip, and it should never even have been compared to the i7. Unfortunately, AMD has no chip that can reasonably be compared to the i7, so all the review sites chose the fastest CPU AMD has on offer that includes an IGP. If you want to push it a bit further, lets ignore the IGP completely, and take the fastest desktop chip AMD has on offer:
FX 8350 –$199.99
i7 4770k –$339
So, we're at 1.9 times the price, and around 1.8 times the performance (see here).
But, of course, we all know that price increases exponentially with performance when it comes to high end processors, so lets just scale back that intel part a bit:
FX 8350 –$199.99
i5 4670 –$213
So now we're at 1.06 times the price (effectively equal), but about 1.5 times the performance (see here).
If you really want to make the price war completely in intel's favour, then look at
FX 8350 –$199.99
i5 4570 - $192
Unfortunately Anand do not list this in their benchmarks, but it's the exact same die as the 4670, just clocked 6% lower, so we can extrapolate the result, and say that this i5 will be around 1.4 times the speed of the FX 8350 Oh, and by the way, it throws in a decent IGP, while the FX 8350 does not. It also consumes only 67% of the power under load, and that's including the IGP.
So conclusion. Haswell is pretty effectively blowing AMD out of the water. The A10 5800 remains reasonably unscathed only because Haswell i3s have not yet been released. When the i3 4220 appears, I would fully expect the A10 to lose to it in every respect in the same way as the FX 8350 loses to the i5 3570 in pretty much all ways.