Intel Announces Devil's Canyon Core I7-4790K: 4GHz Base Clock, 4.4GHz Turbo

MojoKid (1002251) writes "Last year, Intel launched two new processor families based on the Haswell and Ivy Bridge-E based Core i7 architecture. Both chips were just incremental updates over their predecessors. Haswell may have delivered impressive gains in mobile, but it failed to impress on the desktop where it was only slightly faster than the chip it replaced. Enthusiasts weren't terribly excited about either core but Intel is hoping its new Devil's Canyon CPU, which launches today, will change that. The new chip is the Core i7-4790K and it packs several new features that should appeal to the enthusiast and overclocking markets. First, Intel has changed the thermal interface material from the paste it used in the last generation over to a new Next Generation Polymer Thermal Interface Material, or as Intel calls it, "NGPTIM." Moving Haswell's voltage regulator on-die proved to be a significant problem for overclockers since it caused dramatic heat buildup that was only exacerbated by higher clock speeds. Overclockers reported that removing Haswell's lid could boost clock speeds by several hundred MHz. The other tweak to the Haswell core is a great many additional capacitors, which have been integrated to smooth power delivery at higher currents. This new chip gives Haswell a nice lift. If the overclocking headroom delivers on top of that, enthusiasts might be able to hit 4.7-4.8GHz on standard cooling."

Comments

More useful metrics?

[StripedCow]

Why don't we ever read about more useful metrics, such as the amount of (floating-point) operations per second per $ of a given CPU?

Re:More useful metrics?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

Why don't we ever read about more useful metrics, such as the amount of (floating-point) operations per second per $ of a given CPU?

Because the target market for this thing doesn't consider that a useful metric, and never has.

For some years now (at least back to the P4 era, if memory serves), Intel has always offered the mad-crazy-overclocker-must-go-faster-edition CPU at the top of their (desktop, sorry Xeon buyers!) price list, usually ~$1,000. This part is always an astonishingly poor value, unless what you want is the fastest x86 money can buy. Most of them go to gamer e-peen setups, they may sell some to compute customers who have some pathologically hard-to-parallelize problem and thus need the fastest single threaded performance they can get, rather than more cores with lower performance per thread but far lower cost.

If you are actually shopping for CPUs, you probably want something like CPUboss, or CPUbenchmark which allows you to do fairly easy comparisons of performance/price (albeit for performance as measured by one or more general benchmarks, if your workload is somewhat atypical, your mileage may vary).

Re:why get this when Broadwell + new chipsets are

[aliquis]

Better yet, why get this *now* when you can wait til the price drops after the next iteration hits.

If you wait ten years you can possibly get one from someone for free!!

Re:Meh.

[afidel]

Lol, you do realize an i5-5370 is roughly twice as fast at video encoding compared to your old Q9450, right? Just because they haven't double the number of cores doesn't mean they haven't improved performance significantly in the consumer space.

Re:why get this when Broadwell + new chipsets are

[kheldan]

Some of you early-adopters may laugh at this, but this has been my upgrade strategy for decades now and from a bang-for-the-buck perspective it's extremely effective.

In other news...

[Torp]

My 2 year old Ivy Bridge Core i7 is fast enough, and will be fast enough for the foreseeable future with no overclocking. Neither Intel nor AMD will get any money from me for at least 3 more years ;)
Last time an overclock was meaningful for me was when I had a Pentium 1 at 233 Mhz. The bus was 66 Mhz, and that was the ram speed as well. Upping it to 250 Mhz on a 100 Mhz bus (remember back when multipliers went in 0.5 steps?) speed greatly improved the overall responsiveness of the system.

Re:why get this when Broadwell + new chipsets are

[drinkypoo]

Some of you early-adopters may laugh at this, but this has been my upgrade strategy for decades now and from a bang-for-the-buck perspective it's extremely effective.

It's not just about the bang, either, but about the boon or the bane. If you wait for a while, you get to see whether something has massive fail built into it. When I buy based on hope I usually fail. When I buy based on what seems to have held up, I am usually happy. Leaving time for the 1.1 or 2.0 rev motherboard and some bios updates, and for some video driver updates, really improves system stability.