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

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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

[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.

Wow..

[davethomask]

Seymor Cray material?

Repost

[Zanadou]

Didn't I read about this last week??

Re:Repost

[Vigile]

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

Yawn

[BrendaEM]

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

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

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.

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?

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....