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Intel's Haswell-E Desktop CPU Debuts With Eight Cores, DDR4 Memory

crookedvulture writes: Intel has updated its high-end desktop platform with a new CPU-and-chipset combo. The Haswell-E processor has up to eight cores, 20MB of cache, and 40 lanes of PCI Express 3.0. It also sports a quad-channel memory controller primed for next-gen DDR4 modules. The companion X99 chipset adds a boatload of I/O, including 10 SATA ports, native USB 3.0 support, and provisions for M.2 and SATA Express storage devices. Thanks to the extra CPU cores, performance is much improved in multithreaded applications. Legacy comparisons, which include dozens of CPUs dating back to 2011, provide some interesting context for just how fast the new Core i7-5960X really is. Intel had to dial back the chip's clock speeds to accommodate the extra cores, though, and that concession can translate to slower gaming performance than Haswell CPUs with fewer, faster cores. Haswell-E looks like a clear win for applications that can exploit its prodigious CPU horsepower and I/O bandwidth, but it's clearly not the best CPU for everything. Reviews also available from Hot Hardware, PC Perspective, AnandTech, Tom's Hardware, and HardOCP.

181 comments

  1. *drool* by msobkow · · Score: 4, Funny

    *drool*

    'nuff said.

    I'm still clunking along on a P4 3.8 GHz. I'd love a new box that fast!

    --
    I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
    1. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      ...to do what? I've long stopped caring about this stuff. It seems to solve no real problems out there.

    2. Re:*drool* by dugancent · · Score: 2

      You're not the only one. Im chugging along with a c2d from 2008. I can get at least another three years out of this, if not more. Speed brings nothing to table in personal computing anymore (outside of gaming and i'm not and have been a gamer).

      --
      SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
    3. Re:*drool* by lgw · · Score: 1

      ..to do what? I've long stopped caring about this stuff. It seems to solve no real problems out there.

      Well, I use my CPU to transcode media files, so I might get one. But for gaming? When will CPU ever matter for gaming, unless your running some terribly-written Java game?

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    4. Re:*drool* by Bob+the+Super+Hamste · · Score: 4, Informative

      We have probably passed the point where for most applications more speed, memory, cores, etc does anything for users but I welcome the latest and greatest. I don't do much gaming and that which I do is mostly old games that would run fine on an old Pentium 166 MMX. There are other resource intensive computations for which this is useful. My personal example is I do some amateur cartography and GIS stuff and to do what I wanted with my last machine (Athalon 64 x2) was painful and sometimes would take days to complete a single operation, mostly due to being stuck at 4GB of physical RAM. That machine got replaced by an i7 3770k with 32GB ram and what use to take almost a week could be done in about 10 minutes. Now granted a use case like this is rare but there are probably others like it, but not everyone is doing dick measuring based off of frames per second.

      --
      Time to offend someone
    5. Re:*drool* by SirMasterboy · · Score: 1

      Speed brings a lot more to personal computing than gaming.

      It makes my photoshop/c4d/after effects render faster. It makes my audio and video encode faster. And it makes my code compile faster.

    6. Re:*drool* by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 2

      Speed brings nothing to table in personal computing anymore (outside of gaming and i'm not and have been a gamer).

      There are LOTS of applications outside of gaming where more speed is appreciated. Especially if you're a professional. (Of course, it's arguable you didn't mean that when you said "personal" computing, but I'm not working in an office, and my work machine is my "personal" machine.)

      I was chugging along with a c2d for a long time too. But there came a time when it was long past due for replacement.

    7. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A Core 2 Duo is is a ton faster than en shitty P4 3.8 GHz though. You'll have trouble playing HD video with a P4.

    8. Re:*drool* by schlachter · · Score: 3, Insightful

      there was a time, back in the 90's (rapid progression of 286/386/486/Pentium) where you needed to upgrade your computer every 2-3 yrs or you couldn't even run the latest software...and i'm not talking hard core games...even simple stuff like word processing or the newest ver of windows.

      seems like now you can get by with 5-6 yr cycles, esp with the introduction of an ssd and more ram.

      --
      My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
    9. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      When you need to run a simulator and the CPU is used for physics.
      Then, a c2d will not cut it.

    10. Re:*drool* by mr_mischief · · Score: 1

      Why spend $2000 to update from a P4 though? For $350 or $400 a system can show your P$ to be a waste of electricity.

    11. Re: *drool* by Redbehrend · · Score: 1

      Cpu matters for next gen games more than you think. A good example is the voxelfarm engine.

    12. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      AMD Athlon64 5600+ with 4GB RAM right here. I am running a SSD with an AMD 6800 and since modern games are made for consoles I can run them just fine.
      Next in line will be a triple display upgrade .... iracing :)

    13. Re:*drool* by mestar · · Score: 4, Informative

      Single thread performance from core 2 duo from 2008, to the 4770 i7 from this year improved just 90%, so, not even a doubling in speed.

    14. Re:*drool* by tysonedwards · · Score: 2

      A large part of that is because recent improvements in computing have come in terms of efficiency rather than raw number crunching ability. Being able to have a Xeon machine with dual GPUs run well with a 450w power supply versus a 1500w power supply is a prime example. Desktops that run in 25w versus 450w is another such example. Yes, there certainly have been GREAT advancements over the past few years and those shouldn't be overlooked, but the emphasis has been around smaller, lighter and more efficient, with a 5% YoY gain in performance while you're at it.

      Gone are the days of once every 18 months a computer being twice as fast.
      Instead we have the days of a computer with a battery that runs twice as long, boot in half the time, and faster wireless connections (some that even outperform their wired counterparts).

      The reason why people *needed* to upgrade historically on such a rapid cadence was because technology was evolving at such a rapid pace. Those who would build the tools that everyone else wanted to use were geeks themselves and wanted to be on the latest and greatest, exploiting the advantages that the rapidly advancing technology would provide for them. Advances like MMX or SSE, or for that matter the move from 16-bit to 32-bit instruction sets gave some excellent benefits to those early developers as it allowed for programmers to design complex operations more easily as well as simply do certain things faster, letting applications like Excel deal with much larger data sets and perform comparisons instantaneously instead of the previous "Calculating, please wait." prompts that users would experience. Then, somewhere along the way these hardware architecture improvements no longer were a requirement for the vast majority of applications to run effectively, or even for developers to specifically target applications against. It became more of a minimum being "on this hardware, this runs 'well enough'" as opposed to "it just won't run".

      At present, GPGPU acceleration does much the same thing for us today as the architectural changes did for us during the late 90's and early 2000's. When someone says "I need more raw power", that's usually where they turn to in computing space any more. There is certainly the case for x86, PowerPC, ARM and other conventional architectures and they remain at the core of every computer, but the large scale deployments that need massive number crunching capabilities are moving GPGPU. (See scientific computing, clustering, high performance computing, ...)

      --
      Thirty four characters live here.
    15. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      It makes sense to offload processing off some of the gpu cores on to cpu cores sice they are abundant AND unused.

    16. Re:*drool* by toejam13 · · Score: 1

      I second this. It isn't always about performance.

      I recently replaced my Core i7-930 (Nehalem) system with a Core i7-4790S (Haswell) system. The new system is modestly faster. But mostly, it requires significantly less power, resulting in a cooler and quieter system. My case fans now only run when gaming for long periods.

      If I lived in a colder part of the country, I probably would have kept my i7-930 for another couple of years. But I live in an area where A/C is a must. So I expect the upgrade to eventually pay for itself in the form of reduced electrical bills.

    17. Re:*drool* by 0123456 · · Score: 1

      When will CPU ever matter for gaming, unless your running some terribly-written Java game?

      When consoles stop shipping with such crappy CPUs.

    18. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      A $50 Celeron G3220 runs circles around your P4. It's about 6x faster already! A $150-ish i3 would be about 10x faster, and a $250-ish i5 about 15x. Hell, even an old Core 2 Duo slaughters this PC by a huge margin because it's a dual core, both cores being quite faster too. And the P4 is quite power hungry too.

      Time to retire that wasteful slow dinosaur! You're probably already paying the price of an upgrade on your power bill anyway!

    19. Re:*drool* by msobkow · · Score: 1

      Working on my pet project. Having Eclipse start in under 10 minutes. Being able to run *all* my code manufacturing jobs all at once, instead of having to run three at a time on my laptop (the longest job takes 20 hours to run.)

      Believe me, I could use the CPU power. I'm not an "average" user, just a broke one. :P

      --
      I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
    20. Re:*drool* by msobkow · · Score: 1

      BTW, that 20 hour job is running on a Core i7 mobile/laptop chip, not my P4. I shudder to think how long the P4 would take...

      --
      I do not fail; I succeed at finding out what does not work.
    21. Re:*drool* by Feces's+Edge · · Score: 1

      We have probably passed the point where for most applications more speed, memory, cores, etc does anything for users

      Awful and mediocre programmers (the majority) are trying their hardest to make their software as inefficient as possible so as to completely or mostly eliminate any advantages we get from the latest and greatest technologies.

    22. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Every time I run the numbers, I can't justify a hardware upgrade based on electricity savings. The payback time is significantly longer than the life of the new machine. (Especially in the winter here, where the old machine reduces my heating costs by some minuscule amount.) But you need to run the numbers for your situation. For me, a Core 2 Quad in an old Dell Optiplex I found in the dumpster at work does everything I need, reliably, quietly, quickly (enough), for free. Slap a decent Linux distro on there (Debian Jessie with XFCE is nice, as is Linux Mint 17 with Mate), and for my admittedly basic use scenarios, I'm set for the next 3-5 years.

    23. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Right after they came out, I build the box I have now, with the new schmantzy corei7-920. It has 12GB of ram, and has held up very well. Its getting a bit long in the tooth. I've replaced all of the Seagate OEM drives (they said OEM even though I bought them individually, and they were supposed to have a MTBF of 100,000 hours (11 years), even though I replaced all of them in less than 4 (so before anyone says 11 years/4 is the new MTBF, yes it is....but its the average worst case on a single drive, not the lot!). Everything else has run very well. Maybe in the new year I upgrade.

    24. Re:*drool* by zlives · · Score: 1

      haha i am still using mine though soon i will succumb to starcitizen and an upgrade

    25. Re:*drool* by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      PS4 and XBone are _already_ x86 so not sure if you are being serious, sarcastic, or cynical.

      Are you referring to their abysmal 1.6 GHz clock speed?

    26. Re:*drool* by Dutch+Gun · · Score: 1

      Game developer here. A lot of stuff still happens on the CPU, especially when you're talking about large-scale AAA 3D games. Note that some of these items may make use of additonal GPU or specialized hardware, but that's still somewhat rare.

      * Model animation is performed on the CPU. This is probably the biggest CPU hit in most AAA games today.
      * Audio engines are all in software now, and they're applying a lot of real-time effects, in addition to the costs of real-time decompression and mixing overhead.
      * Physics and collision detection is performed on the CPU.
      * Pathfinding can be very CPU-intensive.
      * Particle effects are sometimes performed on the CPU, especially if they need to interact with the world in any way or have complex behaviors.
      * AI and any sort of scripting is, of course, performed on the CPU

      Obviously, some games push the CPU a lot harder than others, but it's still important to have a reasonable CPU/GPU balance if you want to be able to play a wide variety of games.

      That being said, of course it's pointless to upgrade your CPU if you're already GPU-bound, and that still tends to happen faster, because it's easy to crank up visual complexity until your video card chokes and sputters under the load.

      --
      Irony: Agile development has too much intertia to be abandoned now.
    27. Re:*drool* by Shinobi · · Score: 1

      "Speed brings nothing to table in personal computing anymore (outside of gaming and i'm not and have been a gamer)."

      That is just so stupid. Personal computing is not just about gaming or browsing or a bit of coding.

      Many non-geeks do things that require way more computer horsepower than geeks do. Like 3D, video/movie, heavy graphics editing, music and the list just goes on.

    28. Re:*drool* by Shinobi · · Score: 1

      "When will CPU ever matter for gaming, unless your running some terribly-written Java game?"

      When you have a game that does a lot of AI stuff? Sins of a Solar Empire and the Total War series both tend to hit the CPU quite hard when your fleets/armies become large....

      To the point of "Don't zoom in, just let the fleet autoattack...." yet you zoom in anyway, and get 120 FPS thanks to the GPU, but no units doing anything except in a slideshow, due to the CPU being hogged... Of course, I probably shouldn't have enough carriers/drone hosts for 300+ fighter and bomber squadrons..... Nor should my opponent....

    29. Re:*drool* by DoomSprinkles · · Score: 1

      to be fair... In my job, It does me very well to have 10+ VMs running on my desktop machine 24/7. Sandy Bridge-E (3930K, hex-core) was a god send for this. The 64 GB of RAM plays no small part as well, of course. I believe I left an E-8600 Core 2 Duo and 4 GB of RAM for this particular upgrade. Needless to say, for this workload, it was a fantastic upgrade. Obviously, there's been no value in leaving SB-E for IVB-E or now Haswell-E as the performance jump just is so minimal. Though, some of the cool things they've put on the silicon in these last 2 gens are enticing, but just not enough to leave for. I'd say the coolest thing about Haswell-E is the X99 chipset. That chipset is drool worthy at 10 6Gb/s SATA ports, butt loads of PCIE lanes, and DDR4 support.

    30. Re:*drool* by DoomSprinkles · · Score: 2

      Awful and mediocre programmers (the majority) are trying their hardest to make their software as inefficient as possible so as to completely or mostly eliminate any advantages we get from the latest and greatest technologies.

      Man, I'd say we are leaving the point where the bad programmers can slow these machines down and we're not looking back. The downside to this is that it's going to fully encourage those bad programmers to continue their bad practices since "their program runs great!" (because of the hardware, not their good coding skillz)!

    31. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      We have probably passed the point where for most applications more speed, memory, cores, etc does anything for users

      Awful and mediocre programmers (the majority) are trying their hardest to make their software as inefficient as possible so as to completely or mostly eliminate any advantages we get from the latest and greatest technologies.

      Fscking signed. Linux does not escape this, every year the same boxes run slower and slower even though they are clean installed every 6 months becasue bad programming, especially bad web tech programming just gets slower and more resource intensive for literally no gain at all.

    32. Re:*drool* by dugancent · · Score: 1

      That's why I said personal computers, not business machines/workstations.

      --
      SJWs are the new boogeyman. -Me
    33. Re:*drool* by rossz · · Score: 1

      All too often the programmers aren't given time to optimize the code. Middle management weenies hear the "we got it working" part of the demonstration, and don't care that it's running too damn slow. They have shit to sell right now!

      And yes, too many coders have no idea how to optimize.

      --
      -- Will program for bandwidth
    34. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      That's why I said personal computers, not business machines/workstations.

      On my personal computer I do quite a bit of GoPro HD video editing (1920x1080 x60fps). I can assure you that speed matters, a lot. I've been waiting to see what came out of this release before deciding which new PC to buy to speed it up. The problem with the assumption people make when they say "most people/normal users don't need more than.." (whether it is performance or software features), is that they forget how diverse interests and use cases are out there.

    35. Re:*drool* by TheRaven64 · · Score: 3, Interesting

      For building big C++ projects, as long as the disk (yay SSDs!) can keep up, you can throw as many cores as you can get at the compile step and get a speedup, then sit dependent on single-thread performance for the linking. I got a huge speedup going from a Core 2 Duo to a Sandy Bridge quad i7, then another noticeable speedup going to a Haswell i7 in my laptop. The laptop is now sufficiently fast that I do a lot more locally - previously I'd mostly work on a remote server with 32 cores, 256GB of RAM (and a 3TB mirrored ZFS array with a 512GB SSD for ZIL and L2ARC), but now the laptop is only about a factor of 2 slower in terms of build times, so for developing individual components (e.g. LLVM+Clang) I'll use the laptop and only build the complete system on the server.

      --
      I am TheRaven on Soylent News
    36. Re:*drool* by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      Above poster needs to be modded up. The fastest "duo" in single threaded performance from 2008 is the E8600.

      The fastest i7 is only 85% faster at single threaded jobs.
      The fastest i5 is only 65% faster at single threaded jobs.
      The fastest i3 is only 57% faster at single threaded jobs.
      The fastest AMD FX is only 26% faster at single threaded jobs.
      The fastest AMD APU is only 18% faster at single threaded jobs.

      The cost of the E8600 is $45. forty-five fucking dollars.

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    37. Re:*drool* by Rockoon · · Score: 1

      1.6ghz, and AMD.

      Even selecting a 4-core CPU at complete random from the $50 to $100 range on newegg, you are still likely to get a better performing CPU. In other words, its difficult to actually own something worse. The reason for this is that the closest desktop APU to the chip that the PS4 uses is only $49.

      $49 fucking dollars.

      So yes, consoles ship with "such crappy CPUs."

      --
      "His name was James Damore."
    38. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Instead we have the days of a computer with a battery that runs twice as long, boot in half the time,

      In 18 months? You've got a citation for that I presume. I call bullshit. The real reason progress has slowed is due to the fact that per core clock speeds have virtually come to a halt and not every piece of software can be SMPed to any great degree. Some tasks are just inherently serial. I am cautiously awaiting some new breakthrough that will allow clock speeds and serial computing to once again move forward.

    39. Re: *drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      12 months ago I bought a Surface Pro. Before that I had a ThinkPad X series.

      Surface Pro has twice the battery life and boots in half the time.

    40. Re:*drool* by Shinobi · · Score: 1

      And yet again you make an erronous assumption. Many non-geeks do those things for HOBBIES, and only have one computer(and maybe a tablet...)

      Which means that they do those hobbies on their personal computer.

    41. Re: *drool* by lgw · · Score: 1

      When I think "next gen games" I think games written for mobile platforms that look like flash games and would have run on my C64, What specifically did you have in mind?

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    42. Re:*drool* by lgw · · Score: 1

      I've never seen a gaming-related benchmark where the slowest new desktop CPU you could buy wasn't "enough".

      Can you give me an example of a modern game (other than minecraft) where the difference between 2x2 GHz and 8x4 GHz CPUs would be human-noticeable?

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    43. Re:*drool* by lgw · · Score: 1

      Thanks - a real example! Wow, to me "300" does not sound like a large number for a computer. My mind boggles at how anyone could write code that bad - the AI must be written in some wildly inappropriate language? Or the developer just didn't care about perf and never got a bug assigned as they didn't QA at that scale? Nah, he got the bug and the game shipped with it, of course.

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    44. Re:*drool* by schlachter · · Score: 1

      Maybe not doubling every 18...but the general trend is there...

      WiFi speeds are about 100x faster than 10 yrs ago.
      Boot times are about 10-20x faster than 10 yrs ago.
      Battery life is about 4-5x longer than 10 yrs ago

      Meanwhile, prices are about 1/4 what they were 10 yrs ago.

      I'll take that over speed increases.

      --
      My God can beat up your God. Just kidding...don't take offense. I know there's no God.
    45. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Yeah, you stopped caring when mommy and daddy wouldn't buy you another computer and you couldn't afford one on your own. Go get a (real) job, then you'll have money to buy a better computer with and a use for the performance.

      With a P4, I would stop using it just because you lose more money with the amount of power they draw.

    46. Re: *drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      300+ squadrons, on each side. Easily 10k individual AIs running around.

    47. Re:*drool* by bored · · Score: 1

      Its not even about optimizing the code, its making choices that from the beginning cannot result in faster code. People like to focus on the overhead of JITs, GC's, and hidden object copies, etc, in many "modern" languages, but frankly while they have an effect, the mindset they bring is a worse problem.

      Modern machines can lose a lot of performance with poor memory placement/allocation in a NUMA configuration, doing cache line ping ponging, and on an on. Things that are simply not controllable if your language cannot even guarantee a consistent location for the data in question.

      Lets not even talk about the horrors of HTML/javascript/CSS/AJAX/etc.

      Now, all that said, a huge percentage of applications are going to be "fast enough" if they were written in bash, running in an emulated x86, in javascript, in firefox on a $50 tablet. Simply because even the slowest thing available today has 100x the performance of the machines 15 years ago which somehow managed to be useful without storing all their data in the "cloud" for the NSA to peruse.

    48. Re:*drool* by bored · · Score: 1

      There are LOTS of applications outside of gaming where more speed is appreciated.

      But a lot of those applications are also runnable in networked clusters. I stopped compiling code on my desktop probably 15 years ago and haven't looked back. Buying a single machine with 32-cores and a super fast RAID shared between a dozen or so developers both improves individual compile times and saves a bunch of money over buying a bunch of faster desktop machines for everyone. Edit the code locally, save to a network share, compile remotely.

      Same thing for VMs, ray tracing, transcoding, scientific computing, etc,etc.

      There are still a few "workstation" level applications but its questionable whether the i7 line is more appropriate in those circumstances than just buying multisocket xeon configurations (which provide even more cores and memory bandwidth).

      All that said, don't get me wrong, I really like my single threaded performance which is where I think people have been sort of missing the boat for the desktop. AKA I would pick a dual core machine over a 16 core one if the cores were even 2x as fast at single threaded operations.

    49. Re:*drool* by bored · · Score: 1

      Yes, and for a desktop machine probably 90% of what I do is limited by the single thread performance .Hence why I haven't upgraded in a while myself.

      So, I do welcome faster machines, what I don't welcome is the fact that the vast majority of machines being sold today are actually _SLOWER_ than what was available a few years ago.

      This happened at work, we replaced a couple of older machines that cost a fortune with a couple newer far less expensive one and the performance was actually worse.

    50. Re: *drool* by Finite9 · · Score: 1

      I don't upgrade my system just for extra speed or cores, although that's nice with more cores when you transcoded video. For me its more about the surrounding technologies like chipsets, PCI speeds USB speeds especially sata upgrades, because the bottleneck is still the damn disc drive even with ssd.

      --
      "Everyone knows that vi vi vi is the number of the beast" -- Richard Stallman
    51. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Just tell me how many have so extensive 3D or video hobbies, that a quad core would not suffice.

      Graphics editing and music don't require much computing power: just slab in enough RAM (maybe 8-16 GB) and you're done with a reasonable quad or even dual core. I do this stuff on a quad core from the year 2007 and 8 GB DDR2 RAM and never had a problem or felt it was to slow.

      The assumption that there are many hobbyists that need huge computation power just doesn't hold true.

    52. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      CS Student with specialization in parallel computing here.

      I would argue that many of those things are not so rare to run on the GPU. Especially physics incl. collision detection, particle effects, path finding, audio (with computing of reflections and refractions) and AI profit heavily from running on the GPU. And many of those things are not that hard to port from CPU to GPU.

    53. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Buy a SSD. ;) It cut my Eclipse start-up time significantly and greatly improved many operations, especially searches, generating hierarchies and builds.

    54. Re: *drool* by lgw · · Score: 1

      Ahh, that's less silly. But still, someone must be doing something N^2 there (which, OK, might be understandable given a sufficiently compressed delivery timeline and an AI written from scratch - I'd likely also do something N^2 as a first pass before optimizing, just to make sure the behaviors looked sane).
       

      --
      Socialism: a lie told by totalitarians and believed by fools.
    55. Re:*drool* by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Bit of perspective here. How many industries would kill to get a 90% improvement on a core metric, in a span of 6 years? I'm betting nearly all of them.

      Yes it's not the same historic rate of improvement in IT. Still.

    56. Re:*drool* by msim · · Score: 1

      I know there's some humor intended here, but heck i figure it's worth mentioning that Dual/Quad core atom's rival if not beat the pants off P4 processors.
      I mean, just look at This.

      --

      Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
    57. Re:*drool* by msim · · Score: 2

      When I had a Dual Processor Power Mac I could turn the heaters in my house down a couple of notches as the G5 would act like a space heater. Heck that was its nickname in a number of forums.

      I decided enough was enough when the temperature in front of the computer in summer was rivaling sitting out on the bitumen on the road. Almost immediately after turning the G5 off permenantly, my power bills went down $70 per quarter.

      --

      Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
    58. Re: *drool* by msim · · Score: 1

      I've got an i5 Desktop at home, an i7 laptop that i use out and about. But the device I use more than any other is an atom based tablet as I can get 10-11 hours of continual use on the one charge and it's adequately fast for most lightweight things I do.

      --

      Life is like a box of chocolates, you never know when your gonna get food poisoning.
    59. Re:*drool* by Jane+Q.+Public · · Score: 1

      Sure, but as I say, I don't work in an office and there aren't lots of people using my network. Only one or two. So a 4-core machine is usually fine, but faster is still better. It would be great to have $2000-$3000 for an 8-core Haswell-E with motherboard and all the associated components, but it's not in the budget right now. Maybe next year. Besides, clock speed should be up again by then.

    60. Re:*drool* by nhat11 · · Score: 1

      It's needed in corporations and some agencies (though not this expensive) where they load so many applications and security software that a new tech refresh is needed every 2 yrs.

    61. Re:*drool* by toddestan · · Score: 1

      A Core 2 Duo is is a ton faster than en shitty P4 3.8 GHz though. You'll have trouble playing HD video with a P4.

      That'll depend a lot on what generation of P4 you're running. If you have a late LGA775 P4 in a motherboard with a PCI Express slot you can slap in a decent graphics card and you'll have no problems playing HD video. If it's an older socket 478 P4 you'll have an AGP slot and your options are a lot more limited.

  2. Price by wisnoskij · · Score: 1

    At least the one review I looked at said it was only $1K.

    --
    Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
    1. Re:Price by SirMasterboy · · Score: 5, Interesting

      Though the lower-end model is only $300 for a 6-core 12-thread!

      http://www.microcenter.com/pro...

  3. Nice by MyLongNickName · · Score: 1

    I recently (less than a year ago), bought an i7, four core, 8 thread machine. I use it a lot for chess analysis, and it is amazing how quickly it can get to a 24 ply deep analysis. Even with a slightly slower clock, 8 cores would be so much quicker.

    --
    See my journal for slashdot ID's by year. Mine created in 2005. http://slashdot.org/journal/289875/slashdot-ids-by-year
    1. Re:Nice by DiamondGeezer · · Score: 1

      I have a similar spec in a laptop workstation where I run cloud software in VMware workstation. For most people 24GB of RAM and a quad-core i7 is not going to make their wordprocessing or browsing any better, so for most people tablets are more convenient and useful.

      Cores matter in virtualization of course, but at the moment, the slowest component is the hard disk.

      --
      Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
  4. ***Big intake of breath*** by DiamondGeezer · · Score: 1

    But does it run Linux?

    --
    Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
    1. Re:***Big intake of breath*** by vivek7006 · · Score: 2

      But does it run Linux?

      No but it runs Netbsd!

    2. Re:***Big intake of breath*** by DiamondGeezer · · Score: 1

      I'm almost going to buy one. But only if I can get better performance that makes the extra money worth it.

      At the moment - naaaah!

      --
      Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
    3. Re:***Big intake of breath*** by Khyber · · Score: 1

      No, but it runs MenuetOS which is what you should be learning because ASM is god and anything else plain out fucking sucks.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  5. just wait by hypergreatthing · · Score: 5, Interesting

    until next year. 14nm shrink should be a huge boost in both efficiency and performance.
    The x99 is an "enthusiast" platform and has pricing along those lines.
    DDR4 is also extremely new. Expect it to get faster/better timing specs as time progresses.

    1. Re:just wait by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      this.

      DDR4 is like $350 for 4x4GB. Too expensive still. This time next year we should see prices closer to what we are paying for DDR3 today.

    2. Re:just wait by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      ...said every analysis of every new computer generation, ever!

    3. Re:just wait by TeknoHog · · Score: 2

      DDR4 is also extremely new. Expect it to get faster/better timing specs as time progresses.

      this.

      DDR4 is like $350 for 4x4GB. Too expensive still. This time next year we should see prices closer to what we are paying for DDR3 today.

      DDR4 is "extremely new" as in 2011. For me, the only real improvement seems to be in power consumption.

      Since regular SDRAM, each DDR generation has doubled throughput, but latencies have only improved very slowly. So in many cases the doubled data rate is just a marketing gimmick. This might explain why each DDR generation has been relatively slow to enter mass market. For example, in late 2008 I was speccing a work laptop, and it had this new and shiny DDR3 memory, with all the issues such as price and availability of big-ass 4 GB SODIMMs. Later in 2010 I bought a new motherboard for home, with DDR2, so apparently DDR3 was still not for everyone.

      Of course, increased throughput does help in many cases, but I especially like the reduced power consumption. So I for one welcome our new DDR4 overlords -- once they are widely available and affordable. Even DDR3 seems hideously expensive compared to other hardware -- I can get a new motherboard for less than the price of an 8 GB DIMM.

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
  6. 5820K is an extremely nice part by CajunArson · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The 5820K is packing 6 cores and an unlocked multiplier for less than $400. If you don't absolutely need the full 8-core 5960X, then the 5820K is going to be a very powerful part at a reasonable price for the level of performance it delivers.

    --
    AntiFA: An abbreviation for Anti First Amendment.
    1. Re:5820K is an extremely nice part by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

      Good eye, I saw that huge difference also. 2x price for 2 more cores? Also does the new architecture provide any benefit outside of clock-related speed?

      Any chance of unlocking cores I wonder?

    2. Re: 5820K is an extremely nice part by Kjella · · Score: 2

      Yes but X99 and DDR4 blows any chance of doing Haswell-E on a budget. I need a new PC and is considering either 4790K or 5960X, the former is fine now while the latter is going all out on new tech which I hope will last longer. Eight cores crushes the mainstream chip in multithreading. Eight RAM slots in case I want to double up, of a type that will exist long and improve much. Plenty PCIe lanes. Slightly weak single threaded performance at stock but considerable overclocking potential. With 10% performance improvement per generation it'll take ages until I need an upgrade again. On the other hand, a 4790K might last me long too.

      --
      Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
    3. Re: 5820K is an extremely nice part by godefroi · · Score: 1

      In my experience, I'm seldom if ever CPU-capped, and if I am, what I'm doing it the sort of thing that 10% won't make a difference on. My advice, save your money. Buy all the RAM you'll want now (16GB, 32GB would be extravagant) before it becomes expensive.

      The few extra months you buy with the 5960X isn't going to make a difference in the long run.

      Of course, I don't know your particular application, nor do I know your particular financial situation. YMMV.

      --
      Karma: Poor (Mostly affected by lame karma-joke sigs)
    4. Re:5820K is an extremely nice part by bill_mcgonigle · · Score: 2

      I was just looking at that one a few hours ago (need to replace my desktop ... Mozilla apps are pigs with high core-affinity).

      I decided against it because it has many fewer of the new instructions than the 4790K, slower clock, and almost double the TDP (and I prefer quiet/low power).

      Obviously for highly parallel tasks that can fit nicely in the 5820K's bigger cache, it will win handily. I'd love to see an ffmpeg coding shoot-out, but I'm concerned that the 5820K's disabled PCIe lanes might hamper other system performance (vs. e.g. the 5830K).

      If anybody here has an ASRock Z97 mobo that they love, I'd like to hear about it.

      --
      My God, it's Full of Source!
      OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
    5. Re:5820K is an extremely nice part by fnj · · Score: 1

      ... the new instructions ...

      You mean like the TSX-NI instructions that can increase performance of certain highly threaded workloads up to 40%?

      Oh, so sorry. Intel spectacularly bit the big one on that rollout. Completely busted. So bad that the latest microcode update completely disables those instructions.

    6. Re: 5820K is an extremely nice part by Khyber · · Score: 0

      "Plenty PCIe lanes. "

      Nowhere fucking near enough. If I can't take a high-end part like this and drop quad PCI-E 3.0 16X GPUs in there, it's not a high end part, period.

      40 lanes is about 40 lanes too few.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  7. DDR2/3/4 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Correct me if I'm wrong, but it seems that while DDR memory bandwidth increases, the CAS latency always remains roughly the same (between 10 and 20ns), so will there really be that much of an improvement?

    1. Re:DDR2/3/4 by tralfaz2001 · · Score: 2

      Lets hope so. DDR3 has always been a joke, since it gained speed over DDR2 when configured in 3 channel banks. Except it is almost never configured that way, and thus resulted in faster clocked DDR2. Hopefully DDR4 works appropriately when configured in a 4 DIMM bank.

    2. Re:DDR2/3/4 by mr_mischief · · Score: 5, Informative

      CAS latency hasn't been measured directly in nanoseconds for some time now. It is now measured in clock cycles. The shorter your clock cycles (the higher your frequency) the shorter in absolute time your CAS latency is for the same number. CAS 10 at 2133 is about the same as CAS 5 on 1066.

      CAS latency on Wikipedia
      Memory timing on Hardware Secrets
      FAQ on RAM timings from Kingston

    3. Re:DDR2/3/4 by danbob999 · · Score: 4, Informative

      DDR is not about the number of channels. You could design a system with 8 channels DDR1 or single channel DDR4 if you want to. New generation DDR RAM is always about lower voltage and higher clock speed. Usually at the cost of higher latency (800 MHz DDR3 is a bit slower than DDR2)

    4. Re:DDR2/3/4 by pjrc · · Score: 3, Interesting

      Just to put "some time now" the time frame into perspective, the last mainstream PC memory form-factor to use asynchronous DRAM was 72 pin SIMMs.

      When PCs went from 72 pin SIMMs to the first 168 pin DIMMs, in the mid-1990s, the interface changed to (non-DDR) synchronous clocking.

    5. Re:DDR2/3/4 by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Memory latency has always been the same. The CAS latency cycles have increased, but so have bus speeds. The absolute latency in ms has remained roughly the same since DDR1 days. That's why 2133MHz RAM has higher CAS than 1600MHz, but in the end it's the same. Only if you get the enthusiast memory do they lower the CAS latency significantly.

    6. Re:DDR2/3/4 by bored · · Score: 1

      CAS latency hasn't been measured directly in nanoseconds for some time now. It is now measured in clock cycles.

      Yah, so to compare two different sticks of RAM you have to multiply the time/cycle by the number of cycles. Which gives you (wait for it....) time!

      Which the parent did, to point out that all these "new" memory technologies haven't been decreasing the RAM latency much at all. RAM latency is still a _VERY_ important part of overall execution performance. Particularly for single threaded operations reading RAM in unpredictable manners. Cache misses are overwhelmingly the single largest optimization variable for modern applications.

    7. Re:DDR2/3/4 by mr_mischief · · Score: 1

      Well, I keep seeing clock rates go up and high-end DIMMs keep having CAS numbers like 9 and 10 despite the rate going from 1333 to 2400 the past few years. (1/2400000000)*10 is 4.16666666666667e-10 while (1/1333000_00)*10 is 7.50187546886722e-10 which looks like a relatively major difference to me.

  8. Intel had to by sseymour1978 · · Score: 0

    > how fast the new Core i7-5960X really is. Intel had to dial back the chip's clock speeds to sell you the same processor twice
    I fixed (probably) that for you

  9. No TSX? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    No TSX on that one too?

  10. Obligatory by gmhowell · · Score: 1

    But will it run Crysis?

    --
    Jesus was all right but his disciples were thick and ordinary. -John Lennon
    1. Re:Obligatory by DiamondGeezer · · Score: 1

      No you'll have to wait for the upgrade with the industrial cooling unit bolted on. Then you might get it usable.

      YMMV

      --
      Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
    2. Re:Obligatory by Khyber · · Score: 1

      It runs Crysis flawlessly while I'm banging your mother, sister, and father.

      Your brother is too busy with my dog for me to do anything with him.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  11. And the Mac Pro is now obsolete or soon will be. by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

    That is the problem with Apple's obsession with small and sexy. Of course if Apple updates the Pro this year all is good but given their history I would not bet on it.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  12. Re:Broadwell by zlives · · Score: 4, Informative

    if you can wait then you should always wait for new tech

  13. Re:Broadwell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    This is the extreme X*9 chipset where costs are multiplied by 225% but performance pct gain in in the single digits. Waiting for Broadwell is prudent. If you are a gamer, you wait - what you have now is FASTER! If you are a rich mofo, you don't use Intel at all! If you are any body else, you wait. Every one lay down and wait!

  14. Re:And the Mac Pro is now obsolete or soon will be by DiamondGeezer · · Score: 1

    That's just nonsense. Just because there are taller buildings doesn't make the Empire State Building any smaller.

    --
    Tubby or not tubby. Fat is the question
  15. Elephant in the room by cowwoc2001 · · Score: 3, Informative

    No one is talking about the elephant in the room: RAM prices are so high that you'd have to spend $700 to hit 64GB RAM (the max the board supports). That is just outrageous.

    These prices are going to lead to a severe drop in demand.

    1. Re:Elephant in the room by umafuckit · · Score: 4

      Why is that the elephant in the room? How many people need 64 gigs of RAM? 8 to 16 gigs is currently plenty for most applications. Yes, there are instances where more is needed, but these instances are rare. Usually people who need more than 16 gigs are requiring this for work-related reasons, where the $700 takes a different perspective.

    2. Re:Elephant in the room by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      In my day 1MB memory sticks went for $75 each and we STILL had demand for them. NOW GET OFF MY LAWN!

    3. Re:Elephant in the room by mestar · · Score: 2

      OMG, 64 GB of RAM for only $700. That is simply amazing, how cheap it is.

    4. Re:Elephant in the room by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      http://blog.modernmechanix.com/mags/InterfaceAge/4-1978/thinker_toys.jpg

    5. Re:Elephant in the room by cowwoc2001 · · Score: 4, Funny

      Two years ago it was half that price.

      Electronics prices are supposed to drop over time. When you compare current prices to 5 years ago there isn't much of a difference.

    6. Re:Elephant in the room by Demonantis · · Score: 1

      The price will probably go down once manufacturing spins up and yields are better. I remember reading on /. that manufacturers over provisioned manufacturing for DDR3. They will probably be more conservative with DDR4 at least in the beginning. Wait a couple months until the market stabilizes.

    7. Re:Elephant in the room by cowwoc2001 · · Score: 1

      Actually, the prices I was quoting were for DDR3, not DDR4 so the problem is actually worse than you think.

    8. Re:Elephant in the room by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      there might be some collusion. Its hard to tell; it would be the first time though.

    9. Re:Elephant in the room by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Two years ago it was half that price.

      Electronics prices are supposed to drop over time. When you compare current prices to 5 years ago there isn't much of a difference.

      Drop over time why? Why do you think this is automatic?
      Pricing of anything changes with supply and demand, production volumes, process efficiency, uhh.. stuff like that.

      The price of WHAT hasn't changed in five years, DRAM chips or DIMM packages... of what capacity?
      If you're looking at bleeding edge PC desktop DIMMs, at lot has changed in regards to volume in the past five or ten years.

    10. Re:Elephant in the room by zlives · · Score: 1

      your lawn is too new, i paid close to 200/mb

    11. Re:Elephant in the room by CityZen · · Score: 1

      I once paid $100 for 16KB ($6400/MB). Of course, Apple was charging $400 for the same amount ($25,600/MB).

    12. Re:Elephant in the room by Khyber · · Score: 0

      Your quoted prices are bullshit. I can get 64GB for ~$350 (tax included) from pricewatch.

      Go back to /g/ where you belong, n00b.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    13. Re:Elephant in the room by TeknoHog · · Score: 1

      Usually people who need more than 16 gigs are requiring this for work-related reasons, where the $700 takes a different perspective.

      $700 may not be much compared to labour, but it's still real money someone in the economy is going to pay.

      The "room" is where you have other computer hardware and electronics, and that keeps getting cheaper and faster all the time. That's why the price fixing of RAM is so obvious. I remember paying less per GB in the DDR2 days.

      Also, memory is supposed to be this relatively dumb part of machinery. As I'm speccing out a new home machine, I notice that the mobo will cost less than 8 GB of DDR3, which is the minimum I'm going to get (and maximum at these prices).

      --
      Escher was the first MC and Giger invented the HR department.
    14. Re:Elephant in the room by bhiestand · · Score: 1

      I suspect you're right about price fixing. However, the fact that someone in the economy has to pay a large sum of real money is irrelevant in determining cost-benefit.

      Yes, it's real money. But so are labor costs. And, in theory, those labor costs represent [a portion of] the real value that person is adding to the economy. So anything that makes the employee able to add value more efficiently is overall good.

      In general, an employee would not be earning $200/hr on a $7,000 workstation if they weren't adding more than $200/hr of value to the economy in some way. So making them more efficient either allows them to add more value, or gives them more free time to do other things (which tend to benefit the economy and society as a whole).

      So maybe there is collusion, price gouging, artificial shortages, or something going on... but I know people who would gladly pay a huge premium for minor speed increases. And that really drives development, which should ultimately benefit the home user.

      --
      SWM seeks new sig for a brief fling
    15. Re:Elephant in the room by cowwoc2001 · · Score: 1

      You might want to tone down your insults. Furthermore, I took a look at http://www.pricewatch.com/syst... and prices are roughly double what you claimed. Next time please provide concrete links instead of insulting for the sake of insulting.

    16. Re:Elephant in the room by Koutarou · · Score: 1

      Around 1990 I came up with a guideline that a power user should always spend USD500 on memory for their desktop. That target roughly held true for over 15 years until the price of memory plummeted in the mid-2000s and you couldn't fit that much in.

    17. Re:Elephant in the room by zlives · · Score: 1

      yes back then I couldn't afford a computer or memory upgrade :)

  16. Re:Broadwell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1

    If you are a rich mofo, you don't use Intel at all!

    Oh, what are the rich folk buying instead?

  17. The I-Word by Mister+Liberty · · Score: 1

    For 'how many lanes of NSA Bulldozer 7.0" (is that the latest?) we'll just have to wait for the next Vanunu or Snowden.

  18. Re:Broadwell by mestar · · Score: 1

    They buy TWO Intels.

  19. Re:Broadwell by PopeRatzo · · Score: 1

    But if I'm trying to game on an old i5-750, wouldn't this be a good time to upgrade to one of the cheaper 4-core Haswells that are running 3.8mhz instead of 2.7? Maybe a Haswell i5 (I guess, I'd need a new mobo then, right?) And the latest PCI-E for a new graphics card.

    I don't like to buy the newest and best, but when the second newest becomes cheap. I've got a really nice case, but I'm not sure if I could put a new processor into my old motherboard or if it would even be worth it.

    I'd like to do something before the fall games come out. Would I be better off just upgrading my old Radeon HD6850 to a nvidia 760 or a Radeon R9 285 or something?

    And did I fall through a wormhole and end up at Tom's Hardware?

    --
    You are welcome on my lawn.
  20. Re: And the Mac Pro is now obsolete or soon will b by cerberusss · · Score: 1

    Come on. The Mac Pro requires you to spend big bucks. It's not too much to ask Apple follow Intel's roadmap with the Mac Pro.

    --
    8 of 13 people found this answer helpful. Did you?
  21. Re:And the Mac Pro is now obsolete or soon will be by John+Bokma · · Score: 1

    Mac Pro uses Xeon E5 v2. It's much more likely that a (small) upgrade is going to use Xeon E5 v3. But hey, don't let me stop you from celebrating the upcoming death of Apple. Parties that go on for decades must be great ;-)

  22. Re:And the Mac Pro is now obsolete or soon will be by Bing+Tsher+E · · Score: 1

    That's right. The Empire State Building is Majestic, and Quaint and stuff. Like the Mac Pro.

  23. Why the need to slow down the CPU ? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    "... Intel had to dial back the chip's clock speeds to accommodate the extra cores ..."

    Can anyone please tell us why is there a need to slow down the CPU speed in order to put in more cores?

    I am no EE, and will appreciate very much any information on this matter !

    Many many thanks in advance !!

    1. Re:Why the need to slow down the CPU ? by slew · · Score: 1

      Can anyone please tell us why is there a need to slow down the CPU speed in order to put in more cores?

      Thermals. More CPUs generate more heat, more heat with the same thermal envelope means you can't run each CPU as fast. Of course in a different environment (say with a liquid nitrogen cooling rig vs an air cooled rig), you could probably clock those CPUs higher.

      Just because you can put in more CPUs doesn't mean you should. It used to be the limiting engineering factors were area vs chip yield. Now days thermals are arguably the most important consideration because often you are limited both thermally (and sometimes even electrically) to the amount of power you can deliver to a square millimeter of a computer chip.

  24. The 3 year cycle... by sdguero · · Score: 1

    As a gamer, I have been on a 3 year PC build cycle since 1992. Every three years (more or less), I build a new PC. Since 2008, I've only upgraded once and my current build (now 2 years old, a 2500k overclocked to 4.4 Ghz) feels pretty darnn fast still. It's weird because 15 years ago, I'd be itching for new hardware with a 2 year old system. Since my Core2 Duo build in 2008, I haven't really seen any noticeable performance jumps other than the move to SSDs and the bigger IPS panels. My old Core 2 system, which is now 6+ years old and on my workbench in the garage can still hold it's own with new games without a problem.

    Obviously there is a lot more to PC/game perfomrnace than just the CPU. But what I'm getting at, is ever since the move to multi-core platforms in the mid-2000s and offloading more work to the GPU(s), hardware development for PCs seems to have slowed down quite a bit. Maybe a combination of the newer hardware not being utilizaed as well as stuff back in the ewarly 2000s and smaller bumps up in the various chip/processor design? Perhaps the greater focus on power savings and mobile development? The trend towards netbooks, and now tablets? Maybe the fact that most kids these days only play on consoles?

    I dunno. It just thinks like the rate of change has slowed down a lot over the last decade. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

    1. Re:The 3 year cycle... by zlives · · Score: 1

      please check out StarCItizen. if it's to your taste... you will upgrade

    2. Re:The 3 year cycle... by InvalidError · · Score: 1

      I dunno. It just thinks like the rate of change has slowed down a lot over the last decade. Or maybe I'm just getting old.

      10+ years ago, performance was more than doubling every two years through a combination of higher clocks, die shrinks, extra transistors, fundamental breakthroughs in logic circuit designs, etc. Right now, mainstream CPUs are only ~60% faster than mainstream CPUs from four years ago because clocks are stuck near the 4GHz mark, die shrinks are becoming much slower in coming, nearly all fundamental breakthroughs have been discovered and modern hardware is already more powerful than what most people can be bothered with so there is a general lack of demand for significantly faster low-mid-range CPUs to make things worse.

      Progress is slowing down and I can only imagine it getting worse in the future.

    3. Re:The 3 year cycle... by drkim · · Score: 1

      Maybe the fact that most kids these days only play on consoles?

      I think you're right about this one.

      Back 'in the day' the game software got more sophisticated almost with each game released. Home consoles were fairly primitive. For the game or pro computer consumer there was a constant pressure to build a machine that could keep up with the latest software.

      I think there are several factors which contributed to the stagnation of the hardware upgrade cycle.

      1. More game developers now are using middleware to develop their product; instead of writing fresh and improved code for each release. As such, the render demands are stratified between each release of middleware, rather than each release of title.
      2. With a larger segment of the game consumers on consoles, the game quality, and render specs, again, tend to stratify between console releases, rather than individual game releases.
      3. The build–your–own PC market has shrunk. Remember all those cool computer shows, and PC boutiques? Most are gone; and the hard-core builder is left with places like Fry's, and Newegg.
      4. With the increase in game consoles, and smart phone games, the number of actual releases for PC has declined. Walk around a Game Stop these days looking for PC games, and you're likely to get the same feeling one would get wandering around an old video rental store looking for Betamax. "Oh look! There's the one shelf with the PC games on it!"

  25. Re:Broadwell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    From an i5? Really? I laugh at people that waste money constantly upgrade their rigs. I usually keep mine for 10 yrs. before upgrading. Before my recently built i7 machine, I was gaming on my previous build: a Pentium 4. Sure, it wasn't the fastest, but I was still playing modern games on it just fine (with only a video card upgrade). I shake my head when I read comments in forums saying you MUST upgrade every 3 years. 5 or 7 is probably must more sane (unless you are like me, and let them get a little long in the tooth first).

  26. Slower games by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Demanding games have been made concurrent for the most part and these will certainly benefit more from 8 cores and huge caches than they will lose from lower frequency. Dual, Quad+ cores are not new. Failure to full exploit SMP in 2014 is a fine reason to avoid a given game as far as I'm concerned.

    1. Re:Slower games by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      > Failure to full exploit SMP in 2014 is a fine reason to avoid a given game as far as I'm concerned.

      That's a crappy reason. You'll miss out on Path of Exile, Minecraft, and Terraria, all which are excellent games.

    2. Re:Slower games by TyFoN · · Score: 1
      As you can see from the feature list of the pre-release of the next major version of minecraft, it does indeed support multiple cores now, at least for chunk rendering which has been the biggest performance problem before, and they are now using vbos instead of the old opengl interface.

      https://mojang.com/2014/08/minecraft-1-8-pre-release-the-bountiful-update/

      These changes consist of both new features, and large game structure changes such as replacing the hard-coded "block renderer" with a system that is able to read block shapes from data files, or performance enhancements such as multi-threading the client-side chunk rendering. We hope you will enjoy it!

    3. Re:Slower games by UnknownSoldier · · Score: 1

      Considering Minecraft has been out for 3 years and they have sold 54+ million copies it is about time they addressed some of the performance issues!

  27. Image processing by fyngyrz · · Score: 4, Interesting

    I use -- and write -- image processing software. Correct use of multiple cores results in *significant* increases in performance, far more than single digits. I have a dual 4-core, 3 GHz mac pro, and I can control the threading of my algorithms on a per-core basis, and every core adds more speed when the algorithms are designed such that a region stays with one core and so remains in-cache for the duration of the hard work.

    The key there is to keep main memory from becoming the bottleneck, which it immediately will do if you just sweep along through your data top to bottom (presuming your data is bigger than the cache, which is typoically the case with DSLRs today.) Now, if they ever get main memory to us that runs as fast as the actual CPU, that'll be a different matter, but we're not even close at this point in time.

    So it really depends on what you're doing, and how *well* you're doing it. Understanding the limitations of memory and cache is critical to effective use of multicore resources. You're not going to find a lot of code that does that sort of thing outside of very large data processing, and many individuals don't do that kind of data processing at all, or only do it so rarely that speed is not the key issue, only results matter. But there are certainly common use cases where keeping a machine for ten years would use up valuable time in an unacceptable manner. As a user, I am constantly editing my own images with global effects, and so multiple fast cores make a real difference for me. A single core machine is crippled by comparison.

    --
    I've fallen off your lawn, and I can't get up.
    1. Re:Image processing by bmayer0122 · · Score: 1

      The gap between the speed CPUs can consume data and the rate at which main memory can supply it has been growing wider since main memory was invested. The idea is that fast memory is too expensive to have all you need, so put a bunch of cheaper slower memory over that way so you are not going to disk all the time. This is called the memory hierarchy and is getting deeper while the gap is getting worse. For example look at SSDs and spinning disk. Now we buy SSDs for their speed but if we have a lot of data around still have a disk or tape store off somewhere (even if only for backup).

  28. Boring...oddly by Sir_Sri · · Score: 2

    Interesting essentially how little benefit they get.

    The X99 mobo and platform is nice, I like a lot of what they're doing there, and all of the system components matter a lot to user experience. But unless you have a very specific requirement any user would be just as well served with a quad core or a octa core, if not better served with the devil's canyon quad core given the single threaded performance. That's probably a bad place for intel to be positioning these, as the target audience for these processors is looking for blazing fast and lots of cores. And it only delivers one of the two.

    I think if I was buying a system this week or next (which... I am) I'd be a bit disappointed that I can't put a devil's canyon quad core on an X99 mobo, and then upgrade the CPU later if they manage to refresh the E series into something more attractive.

    1. Re:Boring...oddly by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      What's also a bit disappointing, so we have a completely new platform with incompatible everything, and the shiny new X99 PCH with its 10 Sata6G ports, M.2, USB3, ... is on the same old 20Gbit/s DMI2 as the first Z68.

  29. "...can translate to slower gaming performance" by Snufu · · Score: 1

    for non-multithreaded games?

    1. Re:"...can translate to slower gaming performance" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Even multi-threaded games typically have only a handful of cpu limited threads, and even then, there's normally one thread with significantly higher cpu requirements that ends up limited first.

      So yes, even with multi-threaded games you are generally better off with a faster clocked quad core vs a slower clocked octo core

    2. Re:"...can translate to slower gaming performance" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      Most games don't scale well past 3 threads. More cores than threads means idle cores and no benefit, but slower cores hurts.

    3. Re:"...can translate to slower gaming performance" by Sloppy · · Score: 1

      Yes. Whenever people talk about "games" you know that's really just a secret code word for Dwarf Fortress.

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      As copyright owner of this comment, I authorize everyone to defeat any technological measure which limits access to it.
    4. Re:"...can translate to slower gaming performance" by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      This will speed with new production lines, also: any gamer looking at this kind of cpu will be spending money on watercooling, and can basically clock it up.

  30. When will the newer gen of intel chips go DDR4? by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    When will the newer gen of Intel chips go DDR4? also what about AMD?

    broadwell is not going to have DDR4.

    1. Re:When will the newer gen of intel chips go DDR4? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      AMD already has new APUs in the pipe and theres rumor of a new high end series. AMD where supposedly loking to get DDR4 out with the release of Kabini, but couldn't get Intel on board so scrapped it as it would have driven the prices up too high on what was supposed to be a low-mid range consumer series chip.

      When you're the underdog you don't want to price yourself out of your intended market just to push new tech that you don't get to set the prices on.

  31. Also why can't the DMI link be better in other cpu by Joe_Dragon · · Score: 1

    Also why can't the DMI link be better in other cpu's

    Why do have to now get an 6 core to use Hasswell-e to get more then 16 pci-e 3.0 + X4 pci-e 2.0 (DMI)

    Most people may only need 1 Video card but with pci-e SSD's coming out more pci-e is needed.

  32. How do these compare to AMD by nzs1 · · Score: 1

    8-core processors?

  33. Re:Broadwell by CODiNE · · Score: 1

    Over clocked POWER chips in liquid nitrogen.

    --
    Cwm, fjord-bank glyphs vext quiz
  34. Re:Broadwell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Over clocked POWER chips in liquid nitrogen.

    The REAL rich kids use vacuum chambers.

  35. Re:Broadwell by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    If it's for gaming, then the CPU isn't really a bottleneck like it's made out to be and there is no gain in going i7 over an i5 unless you are going to be streaming. Though if you are streaming a real 8 core CPU is best as if you look at the reviews of AMD's 8 core AM3+ CPUs youll see that theres no real performance hit when streaming on them.

  36. Re:*drool* -- FPGA development by volvox_voxel · · Score: 1

    I do a lot of FPGA programming and It takes me 15-20 minutes to synthesize a design on a modern fast computer. As more of the part is being used, synthesis takes more and more time, as the chip becomes harder to rout.. I'm a user that is primarily CPU bound. I hope that Intel will continue to push on the raw performance. For the past few years, as we've only seen marginal improvements in CPU performance.

    There is also the issue that FPGAs keep getting cheaper/bigger, so no matter how fast your rig, it always takes a long time to synthesize. I'd be curious about what other FPGA developers use to boot performance.. Overclocking/water cooling does seem to help, as does using faster ram.

  37. How is that surprising? by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 1

    Have you looked at RAM prices? 32GB of DDR3 RAM is about $300-400 for a 4x8GB set, depending on speed and company. So $600-800 for 64GB. Ok well how about server memory, since you can get servers with 6TB of RAM if you like (really, check HP or Dell). For a 16GB DIMM, which is the largest you can get before the price per GB skyrockets, it is about $160-200. fo $640-800 for 64GB.

    So hmmm, looks like DDR4 is right in what other ram costs, plus a bit of a premium since it is brand new tech. What a shock! Who would have every thought it would cost about what RAM costs!

    Get off it. Also it is stupid to act like everyone would need to buy the max amount of RAM. That the system SUPPORTS 64GB doesn't mean you have to BUY 64GB. It means that if you need that much, you can have it. If you need less, get less. Most desktops sold today support 32GB in the form of 4 sticks of 8GB DDR3 RAM. Most systems ship with only 4-8GB of RAM, in 1 or 2 sticks. There is nothing stopping you from using less.

    You see this even more on the server market. We like Dell R720XDs at work. They support 768GB of RAM. However 0 out of 5 that we have purchased have that much RAM. It is exceedingly expensive, since it needs 32GB DIMMS. However it also means that getting 384GB is much cheaper, since it has the ability to do that on 16GB DIMMS. That said, we have only one system that needs that much RAM. The rest? Between 128-256GB. The rest of the slots sit empty, ready to be filled as our needs grow. Two of the 128GB servers will probably be getting more memory soon.

    So seriously, get off it. DDR4 really isn't much more expensive than DDR3, much less than I thought, and memory is cheaper than ever. All these boards mean is if you need a lot of RAM, you can have it.

    1. Re:How is that surprising? by Khyber · · Score: 0

      "Have you looked at RAM prices?"

      Obviously you haven't in some time, because I can get an 8GB DDR3 stick for 40 bucks, which makes my 32GB only a mere fucking $160.

      Do you even pricewatch.com you newegg-stuck n00b?

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  38. As wikipedia likes to say by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 1

    (citation needed)

    I have never seen RAM as cheap as it is now. When you can buy a 16GB ECC DIMM for less than $200, it is rather wonderful. Our researchers that use big amounts of memory are extremely happy with how much memory they can stuff in desktops and servers for a reasonably price.

    Now I'll admit, I don't have a chart of RAM prices, so I suppose I could be wrong, but then I've worked in IT for the last, oh, 20ish years on a continuous basis and spec'ing and buying hardware is a fairly common part of my job.

    So please, show me some evidence from two years ago when RAM was half its current price. Right now I see a 16GB 1600MHz 2R ECC DIMM as running about $170, and a 4x4GB 1600MHz unbuffered set running about $150. So please show me some proof that two years ago I could get those for about $70-90 each.

    1. Re:As wikipedia likes to say by Khyber · · Score: 1

      "RAM prices are so high that you'd have to spend $700 to hit 64GB RAM (the max the board supports). That is just outrageous."

      Except I'm finding 8GB RAM sticks of DDR3 for 40 bucks, So you obviously have no fucking clue how to price-shop.

      Oh, you use /g/ recommended sourcing. No fucking wonder, you retard. Go to pricewatch.com.
      You're probably the same idiot that shills for logicalincrements.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    2. Re:As wikipedia likes to say by drinkypoo · · Score: 1

      Oh, you use /g/ recommended sourcing. No fucking wonder, you retard. Go to pricewatch.com.

      Why, so they can buy some shitty off-brand memory with an ass warranty?

      --
      "You're right," Fisheye says. "I should have set it on 'whip' or 'chop.'"
    3. Re:As wikipedia likes to say by Khyber · · Score: 1

      Shitty? I've got a 486DX4 laptop using memory I got from pricewatch.com in 1996.

      And it's still working.

      All of my memory bought from Pricewatch has worked fine and is still working to this day.

      --
      Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
    4. Re:As wikipedia likes to say by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

      I have never seen RAM as cheap as it is now.

      Then you obviously haven't been looking much.
      DDR3 RAM was a lot cheaper around two years ago (don't know the exact time, look at some price comparators or whatever).

  39. Reviews are lame by nuonguy · · Score: 1

    They run the same benchmarks. It's a lot of copypasta from Intel's marketing material. Boring. How many enthusiasts are helped by a photo of the chip with the cores labelled?

    From the reviews I could not figure out whether vPro or the virtualisation bits were turned on.

    vPro: no
    VT-x: yes
    VT-d: yes

    Source: http://ark.intel.com/products/...

  40. That's a pretty silly statement by Sycraft-fu · · Score: 1

    In computer technology, there is ALWAYS something new next year. Yes, there'll be a 14nm shrink next year (or maybe later this year)... but then just a year away will be a technology update, a new core design that is more capable, and of course they'll have more experience on the 14nm process and it'll be better... however only like a year after that 10nm will be online and that'll be more efficient.

    And so on and so forth.

    With computers, you buy what you need when you need it. Playing the "Oh something better is coming," game is stupid because it is always happening, generally very quickly.

    So if you want a 6 or 8 core system, this is what to buy (it's cheaper than their Xeon setups). Will there be a better ones later? For sure. However sitting in neutral waiting for "the next big thing" is silly. Get a system, keep it as long as it is useful, get a new one when you need a new one.

    Also hating on this for being enthusiast is silly. Ya it is expensive. So don't get it if you don't need it. However for what it does, it isn't bad. Maybe you need that kind of power. Maybe you need more. Not long ago we had a faculty member purchase workstation with 2x 12 core CPUs. These things cost about $2600 PER CPU, never mind the other hardware to support it. System was over $10,000. However, for the simulations he was doing, it was worth it. I'd never buy that for home, my workloads are much lighter, but I'm not going to hate on him needing it.

    Same shit here. Do most users need this? No. Heck most users don't need a quad core. But there are uses for it.

  41. Change is coming... by luminousone11 · · Score: 2

    AMD, and IBM have both been talking about stacked designs for cache memory, Intel has been a big player in HBM/FCRAM development, and AMD, ARM, and others are throwing a lot of weight behind HSA, even Intel is bringing in some of the idea's of HSA at least as far as unified cpu/gpu virtual memory address spaces are concerned. The next 2-3 years is going to be transformative for computing, languages and software libraries will need to catch up with not just with macro threaded concurrency, but also with micro threading concepts. The convergence of "large enough" caches something like Iris Pro but with real cache memory instead of edram, HSA making igpu a first class citizen(think if opencl had access to the programs heap/stack, aka being able to call virtual functions, checking type information, accessing arbitrary objects not directly passed in the functions parameter list), and hopefully HBM/FCRAM will finely catch memory speed up at least for a year or 2(it'ill never last but here's hope'n lol).

  42. Only 8 cores at this point? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Okay, it seems that the individual x86 processors aren't getting that much faster so where are the consumer motherboards containing multiple cpu sockets if adding more than 8 cores is impossible to a single package?

  43. Only 40 lanes by Khyber · · Score: 1

    So I'm only going to have the ability to use two GPUs in SLI?

    Nope. Fuck that.

    --
    Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  44. Methinks it has more to do with the caching by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Read something quite some time ago regarding the mess of multiple cored CPU, specifically on the internal data cache (8 way associative or whatever that they may wanna use)

    I can't really remember the details, but it was about the more cores you put into one CPU the more "watis" the cache gonna generates, and if you clock the cores too high, the wait state may (sometimes) throws the execution queue out of whack

    As I said, I have read that thing quite some time ago (more than 5 years) and I do not have the link. If someone has links to those info, care to share them here?

  45. Re:Broadwell by Khyber · · Score: 1

    "If it's for gaming, then the CPU isn't really a bottleneck like it's made out to be and there is no gain in going i7 over an i5 unless you are going to be streaming."

    Man you're so full of shit I can smell you through the internet. First, the i7 has more PCI-E lanes, which translates over to "I can drop in more GPUs if desired."

    Streaming shit is all dependent upon the framebuffer access now days - GPU. Not CPU.

    It's like people don't understand how hardware acceleration works.

    --
    Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  46. Re:Broadwell by Khyber · · Score: 1

    "4-core Haswells that are running 3.8mhz"

    Only 3.8 MHz? Wow, that's fucking slow. Glad I went AMD instead of intel!

    --
    Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
  47. Re:*drool* -- FPGA development by PremiumCarrion · · Score: 1

    Maybe you could make an FPGA to synthesize faster than a CPU?

  48. The usual issues by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    Whether the programs used are designed to handle that many cores and thus a slower speed on them might be bad for many programs performance.
    Of course tradeoffs (since CPU speed isnt everything...) a better memory flow overall, bigger caches is usually an improvement (though when they are rigidly divided up by core that may be equiv to 10MB for 4 cores which was surpassed in the past)

    Better memory to GPU thruput can be good. Full speed for SSD interfaces etc...

  49. for gaming... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 0

    still gonna need more convincing to upgrade from my amd phenom x4/DDR2 1066 system.

  50. Re:And the Mac Pro is now obsolete or soon will be by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

    Haswell-e does not use the same socket or chipset as Ivy-Bridge E does. It will take an completely new motherboard for the Pro to move to Haswell-E. Look now long Apple let the the old macpro sit after Intel moved to Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge.
    As to Apple dying I really hope not. I love OSX and my macbook. Apples continued obsession with thin and small in markets that do not really need it is what I hate. Had Apple come out with a nice tower and simply used a standard EATX or ATX motherboard for the Pro they would have had a better product.
    Of course you still have the problem with Thunderbolt. Making it both storage and a video connector is dumb. It would have been better as just a storage connector IMHO so standard video cards could be used.
    BTW A thunderbolt connection is no where near as fast as a PCI3 3.0 8x or 16x slot so do not even bother with the external card argument.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  51. Re:And the Mac Pro is now obsolete or soon will be by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

    And the indy car that won the 1974 Indy 500 is just as fast but new indy cars are faster. The Boeing 707 can still fly passengers across the atlantic it is just that the 767 can fly more people cheaper.
    The Mac Pro was a good deal when it came out compared to other workstations in it's class. So you will have the opertunity to buy machines for the same price that are faster. The Apple way is okay for consumer products. "Honestly I hate the imac because they traded the ability to easily upgrade the SSD for thin". It does not work IMHO for a workstation class machine.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  52. Re: And the Mac Pro is now obsolete or soon will b by LWATCDR · · Score: 1

    They did not with the old Mac Pro.

    --
    See my blog http://ilovecookes.blogspot.com/ for light hearted technical information.
  53. So you're saying... by DarthVain · · Score: 1

    5820K should be enough for anyone?

  54. Re:Broadwell by Dogtanian · · Score: 1

    If you are a rich mofo, you don't use Intel at all!

    Oh, what are the rich folk buying instead?

    Processors hand-made by artisans from individual valves/vacuum tubes.

    Of course, you need a rather large house to hold the 1.4 billion valves required to match something like the Core i7. Well, actually you need a rather large estate with enough room to build a large number of very large buildings, and a literal army of support staff to replace the failed valves.

    Trust me though, it's worth it for the additional warmth the use of valves lends to playing back your Nicki Minaj MP3s.

    Then again, that warmth might just be coming from the hundreds of megawatts of waste heat given off...

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