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.

Comments

*drool*

[msobkow]

*drool*

'nuff said.

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

Re:*drool*

[Bob the Super Hamste]

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.

Re:*drool*

[mestar]

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.

just wait

[hypergreatthing]

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.

5820K is an extremely nice part

[CajunArson]

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.

Re:Price

[SirMasterboy]

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

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

Re:Broadwell

[zlives]

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

Re:DDR2/3/4

[mr_mischief]

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

Re:DDR2/3/4

[danbob999]

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)

Re:Elephant in the room

[umafuckit]

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.

Re:Elephant in the room

[cowwoc2001]

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.

Image processing

[fyngyrz]

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.