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."

Comments

Transactional Memory support

[rev0lt]

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.

Re:Transactional Memory support

[Z00L00K]

It's an interesting addition which can be useful for some.

But when it comes to general performance improvement it's rather disappointing. Looks like they have fine tuned the current architecture without actually adding something that increases the performance at the same rate as we have seen the last decades. To some extent it looks like we have hit a ceiling in increased performance with the current overall computer architecture and that new approaches are needed. The clock frequency is basically the same as for the decade old P4, the number of running cores on a chip seems to be limited too, at least compared to other architectures.

One interesting path for improving performance that may be useful is what Xilinx has done with their Zynq-7000 which combines ARM cores with FPGA, but it will require a change in the way computers are designed.

Re:Transactional Memory support

[PhrostyMcByte]

A more immediately useful feature is backwards-compatible hardware lock elision. Before taking a lock, you emit an instruction which is a NOP for older CPUs but causes Haswell to ignore the lock and create an implicit transaction. Instant scalability improvement to just about every app out there with contention, without having to distribute Haswell-specific binaries.

My favorite feature, though, is scatter/gather support for SIMD. Scatter/gather is very important because up until now loading memory from several locations for SIMD use has been a pain in the ass involving costly shuffles and often requires you to load more than you actually immediately wanted, possibly forcing you to spill registers. It's really not something you want to do, but sometimes there are no good alternatives. I'll be super interested to see benchmarks taking this into account.

Re:Transactional Memory support

[gnasher719]

The clock frequency is basically the same as for the decade old P4, the number of running cores on a chip seems to be limited too, at least compared to other architectures.

P4 was an architecture where clock frequency was the design goal, with no regards for actual performance. Any non-trivial operation used lots of cycles, because one cycle was just too short to do useful work. A simple shift instruction was four cycles. An integer multiplication nine cycles. Since Banias, the design goal was performance, not clock speed. The amount of work done in a cycle is vastly increased. The clock speed of P4 and current processors is just not comparable.

On the Macintosh side, Apple shipped pre-release Intel Macs with 3.6 GHz P4s to developers. The first real hardware with 1.83 GHz Core Duos ran _faster_. But if you look at benchmarks, current high-end consumer Macs run about 15 times faster again!

To maybe make a stronger impression: If Apple replaces the processor in the fastest iMac with a Haswell chip, you'll get a computer that would make it into the top 100 of the June 2000 "Top 500 Supercomputer" list. That's how fast a modern Intel computer is, compared to a P4.

Performance per Watt

[Technician]

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..

Software killed the PC, not hardware

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Software killed the PC, not hardware

[PopeRatzo]

Time to put it 6ft underground.

This was the giveaway.

What do you care if there are still people who would rather use a desktop PC that's not behind a garden wall and actually get work done? Why do you insist that the PC platform has to be killed off? Isn't there room in the world for more than one set of computing needs?

This notion, that only the most popular form of anything should exist pops up strangely often around here. The iPad is phenomenal, so Android tablets should just disappear from the market. The iPhone is popular so no Windows phones can be allowed. That sort of thing.

Friend, I can understand that you'd rather work on a tablet and have someone else make decisions about what you can and cannot have, what you can and cannot do, but why in the world are you so insistent that no one else be able to make their own choice?

I don't get you.

How does this compare

[maroberts]

With AMDs CPU/GPU solutions?

Re:How does this compare

[Rockoon]

It's also only in $400+ mobile i7s.

Intel fanboys never want to discuss price, at least not really. Sometimes they pretend, but never want to make an honest price bin comparison.

Re:How does this compare

[beelsebob]

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.

Need to wait a few years

[gnasher719]

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.

Why would Intel care

[zrelativity]

Why would Intel care about raw CPU performance. They have no competition from AMD in CPU performance. The GPU performance may not be as good as A10, but it has improved and that's what matters for Intel.

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.

Get A Clue, Intel

[Jane Q. Public]

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.

Depends on your field

[Frobnicator]

If all you care about is the perspective of the boring desktop business app, then this processor doesn't have much to excite you. Of course, that's just one field. Sending a few database queries over the wire or updating your text boxes doesn't exactly saturate a quad-core box. Business desktop apps don't really see much no matter what.

For data-heavy, cache-intensive, and parallel-intensive programs the processor looks to offer quite a lot. HPC developers like that.

For notebooks and low-power devices the processor is wonderful. If you are paying the power bill for a data center, the energy use will add up. Accountants and laptop users will like that.

The option to have graphics integrated to the chip this way means better SOC options. Embedded developers will like that.

Many fields will see great things out of this chip.

If you are fixated on the world of desktop business software, you still get an incremental ~10% improvement. Unlike technologies such as SIMD, you get it without changing a line of code. So now you can add 10% more text boxes to fill out, or maybe pick up some more wasteful coding habits.