Intel Core i7-4790K Devil's Canyon Increases Clocks By 500 MHz, Lowers Temps

Vigile (99919) writes "Since the introduction of Intel's Ivy Bridge processors there was a subset of users that complained about the company's change of thermal interface material between the die and the heat spreader. With the release of the Core i7-4790K, Intel is moving to a polymer thermal interface material that claims to improve cooling on the Haswell architecture, along with the help of some added capacitors on the back of the CPU. Code named Devil's Canyon, this processor boosts stock clocks by 500 MHz over the i7-4770K all for the same price ($339) and lowers load temperatures as well. Unfortunately, in this first review at PC Perspective, overclocking doesn't appear to be improved much."

Comments

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[Anonymous Coward]

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Speed is not the only thing.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Not everyone is limited by speed. In fact a vast majority of the users are limited by network latency and bandwidth. They will not be helped by overclocking much. Even among people running heavy duty local executables farm out graphics to GPU. So non-GPU heavy duty local apps limited by clock speed makes up for a small subset of the users and applications.

For common people video re-rendering is probably the most CPU intensive task. Even that could be farmed out to GPU, if not already pretty soon.

There are some power users in the accounting and finance department who commit crimes against software using atrociously written Excel macros. Their spreadsheet update time scales as the square or cube of the number of cells. They blame the computer for being slow and demand faster computers. Even this group does not benefit by overclocking because Excell is such a bloat, it triggers so many page faults and long (out of L1, L2, L3 cache) fetches.

So might benefit? May be people like me, doing finite element analysis, mesh generation or other such physics simulations.

For a vast majority of the users, reducing the temperature and applying it to more reliability, longer lasting, less power consuming chips would give bang for the buck. But that is difficult to test, does not garner press reports and more importantly cuts into future sales. So they will obsess with overclocking gimmicks.

Re: Speed is not the only thing.

[zodar]

Who might benefit? Gamers, I imagine.

Re: Speed is not the only thing.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Rendering the scene is the most computationally intensive task. It has already been farmed out to the GPU. Rest of the gaming software does not benefit as much by CPU. Many of the game algorithms are embarrassingly parallel. They nicely scale up in multi core chips. So most threads in a gaming executable idles much of the time. They don't benefit as much by overclocking.

Secondly gamers form a very small segment of the computer users. The mobile phone gaming market is bringing in so many non-traditional gamers into the gaming market. Game companies find them to be far more lucrative than the horse-power obsessed FPS gamers. Gaming industry is also following the money. I think only people left in the traditional desk top market who would be willing to pay for performance are gamers and CAD/EDA engineers.

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[Kjella]

Those things go mostly hand in hand, either you can increase performance or reduce power usage. Things get a little more complicated as you approach SoC power levels, but in general the one with the highest performing chips also can scale them down to the lowest consuming chips. There's a reason Intel can sell $500-1000 mobile chips, in that power envelope AMD doesn't have a match on performance so Intel is free to set the price at will.

Re: Speed is not the only thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Not really, my OC'd i7-920 handles every game i throw at it just fine, all the limitations on performance are disk and gpu bound for me, maybe RAM soon if games keep getting bigger.

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Well said, I'd add that GPU rendering is more than a perspective. So your bottleneck is bandwidth between amazon cloud? :). Why not to simulate on cloud and use their pipes and storage for meshing?

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[excelsior_gr]

May be people like me, doing finite element analysis, mesh generation or other such physics simulations.

Probably not even you. Such tasks demand a huge amount of memory and the bottleneck is often the memory channels on the CPU chip per core. If you scale the benchmark result with the amount of cores, a CPU with 4 cores and 4 channels will outperform a CPU with, say, 6 cores and 3 channels even if the 6-core CPU is clocked higher. Given that the software scales nicely, it will be better to add more CPUs to the cluster than increasing the clock speed. Also, if CUDA takes off, the clock speed of the CPU will be rendered even more irrelevant.

Re: Speed is not the only thing.

[Krneki]

Yap, Star Citizen Arena Commander just came out and you need a properly OC CPU to reach 60FPS. My i5 2500k @ 4.5 is only able to give me 48FPS, while stock CPUs won't give you more then 40FPS.

Re: Speed is not the only thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

As a gamer, there are a lot of games that are CPU bound. ArmA 3 and Skyrim are great examples, basically any game with a complicated physics engine or that's dependent on a lot of AI (Gamer AI, means NPCs) calculations. A faster CPU can offer a much better performance than a slower one with the same video hardware

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[jonwil]

It seems to me that this CPU would be the perfect choice for a MAME setup being that MAME is one of the few things out there these days that is genuinely CPU bound.

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

AMD and Intel should target the low power market...

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Yes, most simulation companies support High Performance Clusters to varying degrees. In hours, bought out, rented from Amazon or Microsoft ... Basically the simulation starts with a relatively small geometry file, user set up some small data sets of material properties etc. CPU and diskusage and data transfers balloon during meshing and go through the roof in solution. Once the matrix is inverted, solution is extracted, post processed and compressed the final output would be only a fraction of the peak data creation. You need to be able to everything through scripts and automation without involving the user in the solution process. It is known, it is supported to varying degrees by software from Ansys, PTC, Synopsis, Cadence, Abacus, Fluent, Feko etc.

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

I have to edit 250+ page documents with diagrams in Word, open PHP projects in NetBeans, work with a Java project in Eclipse, and develop Dart in Google's version of Eclipse. All four of those things each slow my new i7 down to a crawl. It takes about forty minutes to do a find in the Word doc. NetBeans hangs for minutes at a time for autocomplete while you're trying to type. Eclipse often locks-up for ten or more minutes to do classpath scanning. Running dartanalyzer takes eighteen minutes for our project. I can easily spend six hours of an eight hour day waiting on my new computer. You're wrong that people don't need faster computers. As long as we run Microsoft software or software written in Java, for now most users spend more time waiting on computers than actually using them.

Re: Speed is not the only thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure you don't just need an SSD or RAM? You sound more like you're I/O bound. A 250 page Word doc is still a trivial amount of data; media like RAW photos and video is where you start working with truly big datasets.

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[Billly Gates]

But the users of i7s are not the friendly receptionist at work or Grandma checking her FB. These are almost all gamers mixed with software developers and a few niches.

So yes CPU is important. If not then the rest of the normal users buy i3s and maybe an i5 if they have more cash and do heavy workflows. Unless you make 1 tb video edits or play Wolfenstein the average users won't see any benefit between a 4 core i5 or i7.

Re: Speed is not the only thing.

[Billly Gates]

Not true at all! My phenom II with a ati 7850 slows to a crawl with polygon counts in bf 4 and swtor in the imperial fleet. Guild members with i7s with lower end cards have double fps.

The card needs polygons fed to reach render and wait upon DirectX to redraw. A faster CPU is required

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[Billly Gates]

That my friend is what the difference between an i5 and i7. For having many apps and tabs open an i5 is fine. For compiling code more ram channels from an i7 help

Re: Speed is not the only thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Are you sure you don't just need an SSD or RAM?

We already use SSDs and have maxed out the RAM on every desktop. A member of our board is a former Dell exec, and he got us a hell of a deal on Precision T5610 workstations which we used to replace about half of our desktops, including mine. They listed for about $9,500, and we paid about $6,100. They have 8-core Xeon E5-2650 CPUs which sell for $1,300 on newegg.com for just the CPU(!) and 32 GBytes of RAM. The only performance option we didn't get was a PCIe SSD. They have ATA connected SSDs.

You sound more like you're I/O bound.

No, except when NetBeans or Eclipse are doing their project scanning, we're typically single CPU bound. In the Windows Task Manager(taskmgr.exe), you usually see one CPU at 100% and the others at a very low percentage. The CPU usage usually stays around 13%, and 12.5% (1/8 for 8 cores) is what you would expect to be the max for a program that uses a single core. Maybe I'm complaining too much about hardware when the problem is Windows, but the fact remains that we are stuck with Windows and need faster CPUs. If I could buy faster PCs I would. Watching engineers, artists, and an accountant (Great Plains is complete bloatware) stare at a screen waiting more often than they're doing work means my company is bleeding money. We need faster computers.

Re: Speed is not the only thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

> need an SSD or RAM?

He mentioned NetBeans. The usual stall for "Opening Projects" is surprisingly not I/O bound. It pegs one of the cores for several minutes to an hour. Also, with Word I usually put documents in the drive cache before opening with "type document_name.docx > NUL" to get the document in the drive cache before loading, but it can still take several tens of minutes to open larger files. Also, the large files are typically less than 250 Mbytes so that shouldn't take long to load even without an SSD, which I do have. Other tasks, like updating the table of contents, certainly isn't I/O bound, but they can still take tens of minutes on larger documents. The Access database we use internally is also pretty damn slow. It uses only a single core, and moving it to a RAM drive didn't help noticeably with performance. With Windows and with Java, we need faster CPUs than are available today.

Re: Speed is not the only thing.

[Smauler]

I play Skyrim on a core 2 duo pegged to 30% at the moment. At 1920*1200, with a gtx460. It runs fine.

If it were actually cpu bound, it'd play like complete crap.

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Android developers need speed. Even my new Haswell machine bogs down grinding through Android compiles.

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

I can't remember the last time I played a game on MAME that made think I needed to upgrade my CPU. Maybe back in the Pentium-II days.

Re: Speed is not the only thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I noticed Tom's Hardware frequently only measured FPS with resolutions above 1080p (like 2560x1440). I suppose that's fine for high-end buyers, but us low-end and mid-tier people would prefer 720p, 1600x900, and 1080p. (A lot of people don't even have a monitor/HDTV above 1080p.)

Re: Speed is not the only thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Supposedly the Cryengine 4 is CPU bound. It's one of those engines where you really want to throw cores at it.

Re: Speed is not the only thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

Kerbal physics are all on a single thread I think. Single thread performance is all I care about.. well as long as I have four of them!

I loaded a ship that lags my computer to hell on my friends 5GHz i-5 and it played perfectly. Wii emulation relies on CPU a lot but last I checked I think they were trying to offload a lot of it to the GPU.

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[140Mandak262Jamuna]

Let us assume for a moment that you really do need faster machine. How many people are like you? We (my .sln file would take about 2 hours for a full clean build on a dual Xeon, 16 cores , 32 hyper thread machine, git repo on 256 GB SSD, 128 GB memory, last time I did a line count it was well over 3 million loc spread over some 30 libraries 30000 cpp, h files) are a minority. All those gamers and finance executives buying very powerful machines are subsidizing our power machines. My machine costs just over 10K USD.

I am using Visual SlickEdit and it auto completes my names, shows the argument list in a balloon and fills the drop down box for possible variable names to fill in in milli seconds. Heck, it would find all references of any name, with scope and class resolution in seconds.

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[Jane Q. Public]

So might benefit? May be people like me, doing finite element analysis, mesh generation or other such physics simulations.

Actually, finite element analysis is one of the fields that stands to benefit most from the use of GPUs. Although it does depend on just what it is you are doing.

I remember back in the early 90s when our office got a brand-new 25MHz 486. We had great expectations for it. We set up a groundwater flow model (I forget how many cells it was) on the Friday it came in, after I got it all set up. The simulation ran the rest of Friday... we went home. Monday when we came back it was still running...

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[greenwow]

Not everyone is limited by speed

But most people are! The guys that work for me that are technical probably waste 60% of their day waiting on either Eclipse, waiting on Maven which does a shitty job at incremental compiling, or waiting on Tomcat to maybe get around to possibly deploying a .war file. My accountant spends at least 80% of her day waiting on that Great Plains Microsoft garbage. We’re not that big so there is no excuse for Microsoft to take over three hours to display a simple AR aging report. I have a couple of graphic artists that work on PowerPoint presentations for customers. Some of those can take nearly an hour just to page through. I mainly work on technical docs now, and because our main investor is a Microsoft cultist, I’m required to use that Word garbage. About ten minutes ago I hit F9 to update a table of contents, and I’m still waiting...which is why I'm here screwing around.

As long as Microsoft is around to intentionally fuck over people and as long as Java doesn’t improve some of its major performance problems, especially related to tools, users will need faster computers. If I could buy faster PCs, I would. It would pay for itself quickly considering I pay six figures for a CPA to sit for hours a day to wait on Microsoft

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[Anonymous Coward]

that work on PowerPoint presentations for customers

I know of what you speak. This weekend I'm working on a presentation to our board on Monday. I've done at least a dozen revisions and six other people are also making changes. The "Microsoft XPS Document Writer" takes nearly twenty minutes to output a draft for us to review. Considering we're easily going to have more than a hundred versions sent back and forth to review, that means we wasted over 2,000 minutes in waiting on Microsoft. That's over 33 man-hours wasted on waiting on Microsoft Word. Most of us in the company have i7s so people with more average computers would have wasted much more time. It's sad just how many millions of man hours are wasted on this Microsoft garbage. We need faster computers to overcome this.

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[viperidaenz]

What do you think Intel is trying to do with Atom?

Re:Speed is not the only thing.

[Joey Vegetables]

Agreed. It's completely irrelevant to most use cases. But not all. For instance, pro audio, which is a part of what I do, still benefits greatly from increased CPU speed as well as reduced cache latency. The tools I use have not been architected to take advantage of the immense power of modern GPUs. Eventually they likely will be, but, for now, every couple years' worth of CPU improvements does make a significant difference for what I do.

Wow..

[davethomask]

Seymor Cray material?

WTF 500MHz?

[Anonymous Coward]

Am I living in 1999? Who care about 500MHz these days?

Don't come back until you make single-core 10GHz, Intel you POS!@#%%&^*(&!!

Re:WTF 500MHz?

[Anonymous Coward]

Talking about clockspeeds is not very fruitful anyway today. An Core i7 with all the 4 cores utilized can be 20x faster than a single-core Pentium 4, both with same clockspeed and TDP.

Repost

[Zanadou]

Didn't I read about this last week??

Re:Repost

[Anonymous Coward]

Yes, but this time there is a link to a review.

Re:Repost

[Vigile]

That was a paper launch announcement. This post is a review with benchmarks and overclocking.

I wait for Amandahl tech retort

[Anonymous Coward]

Because Amandahl tech can be trust.

Re:I wait for Amandahl tech retort

[davethomask]

lol anan DAHL :)

tro7l

[Anonymous Coward]

ofone single puny Gave the BSD The reaper IDn a will recall that it of challenges that 'fir5t post' faster, cheaper, in a head spinning

No it's techni-babble

[Anonymous Coward]

...a polymer thermal interface material that claims to improve cooling on the Haswell architecture,...

Captain! The polymer thermal interface is failing along the Haswell architecture! I dunno how long I can keep 'er go'in!

K part, 500MHz stock bump DOESNT MATTER

[citizenr]

Intel bumped stock clock on a K designated unlocked part that NEVER works on stock. Pointless gesture.

And it appears to be OC limited to boot, W T F Intel?

Re:K part, 500MHz stock bump DOESNT MATTER

[Xenx]

One sample doesn't show anything. They even mention that in TFA. Also, it appears Intel reported it achieving 5.5ghz on air cooling during Computex for their OC challenge. I wouldn't be the least bit surprised if they cherry picked the cores for the challenge, but it shows they're at least capable of higher.

start your water pumps

[Dorianny]

How much one can overclock has always been a roll of the dice and down to luck. With that being said it is well known in the water cooling community that the cpu thermal interface on sandy/ivy/original haswell was a thermal cooling efficiency limiting factor on water-cooled rigs and there were no spectacular results even on super lucky draws. I am very excited to see how this might change with this new thermal interface material .

Yawn

[BrendaEM]

30 Percent Faster in 3 Years:
http://www.pcper.com/reviews/P...

Overclocking issues?
http://linustechtips.com/main/...

Speed is dead, long live low power

[ArcadeMan]

Apart from games and video encoding, we've kind of reached a plateau of user requirements such that a platform like the AMD Kabini would be plenty for most of the average user. Since the average joe can live with only a tablet, I'm guessing even Kabini is overkill by comparison.

Re:Speed is dead, long live low power

[Bryan Ischo]

Agreed. I've said it before and I'll say it again: significant performance increases in the x86 world are a thing of the past.

There simply isn't enough money in the market chasing higher performance to make the development cost of faster chips worth the investment.

This is actually an opportunity for AMD. I expect it costs AMD less to catch up to Intel than it costs Intel to push to faster speeds, and since Intel isn't being paid anymore to get faster, AMD can, like the slow and steady tortoise, gradually catch up to Intel. I believe it will take a couple more years, but if AMD survives that long, I believe that it will have achieved near performance parity with Intel by then.

And then neither company's offerings will get much faster, forever thereafter, until there is some new kind of 'killer app' that demands increased CPU speeds that people are willing to pay for (could happen anytime; but the way things are going, with everyone moving to mobile phones and pads, I think we're in for a relatively long haul of form factor and power usage dominating the marketable characteristics of CPUs).

I believe Intel will continue to hold a power advantage over AMD for a long time though, but AMD will gradually narrow that gap as well.

The thing is, AMD will be fighting Intel for a stagnating/shrinking CPU market, and more than likely AMD won't increase its margins significantly during this process, it will just reduce Intel's margins. Not really good news for either company, but worse for Intel.

I Miss the Good Old Days

[Anonymous Coward]

Any young tikes in here remember when processor speeds used to increase by 500 MHz in 18 months instead of being stuck in the 3 - 4 GHz range for almost a decade?

Re:I Miss the Good Old Days

[Anonymous Coward]

yes, good times.. anything seemed possible by just waiting a few months until the hardware could take it.
On the other hand now and going forward good software developers will be valued highly because efficient cpu resource usage and smp are difficult but increasingly important.

Re:I Miss the Good Old Days

[15Bit]

Yeah, but there comes a point where it is technologically easier to increase the amount done with each clock tick than it is to make logic that can switch faster. We reached that point about 10 years ago....

Re:I Miss the Good Old Days

[Anonymous Coward]

Yeah, I miss those days in the late 1980's ... it wasn't just the clock speeds that were revving upwards, the hard disk drives were getting larger, doubling every six months (10, 20, 40, 80, 160 Megabytes ... we're up to 2 Terabytes now), the screen resolutions were getting larger (320x200, 640x480, 1024x768, 1280x1024, 1600x1200) as well as pixel sizes (8-bit, 16-bit, 24-bit). Now we're into quad-monitors with HD resolutions, so maybe that is still going upwards.

But CPU cores are increasing, and caching is becoming more optimized. It's more efficient to have multiple copies of a heavily used logic block than it is to ramp up the clock speed. Now instruction pipelines are 14+ stages deep rather than the simplistic fetch, decode, execute, write cycle that early CPU's had.

Re:I Miss the Good Old Days

[Anonymous Coward]

You must have blinked. 4TB are standard 3.5" drives.

Screens have certainly gone backwards.

Re:I Miss the Good Old Days

[Anonymous Coward]

Screens haven't "gone backwards". What you're seeing is just TVs taking over the Computer Monitor market. They have always been larger with lower pixel densities.

Speed and Temp

[Anonymous Coward]

So, Intel lowers the temp, increase the speed by 50 and there are issues with overclock ability? Man, just go invent and build your own proc. Want you cake and eat it too?

Pervasive threading

[Gothmolly]

Why, on a modern machine running a modern flavor of Windows, does a heavy RPG only use 2 cores?

I7 core series

[Anonymous Coward]

im still running First generation 1366 and i havent even Begun to find a reason to upgrade anything but the video and thats just to stay on top of gaming.
it would be nice to get usb3 i suppose but truthfully thats just a pcie addin card away.