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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.

29 of 181 comments (clear)

  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 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
    2. 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
    3. 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.

    4. 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.
    5. 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.

    6. 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.
    7. 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)!

    8. 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
    9. 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.
  2. 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 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.
  3. 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 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
    2. 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)
  4. 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.

  5. Re:***Big intake of breath*** by vivek7006 · · Score: 2

    But does it run Linux?

    No but it runs Netbsd!

  6. 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...

  7. Re:Broadwell by zlives · · Score: 4, Informative

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

  8. 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 mestar · · Score: 2

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

    3. 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.

  9. 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

  10. 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)

  11. 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.

  12. 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.
  13. 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.

  14. 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).