The Haswell Review: Intel Core i7-4770K & i5-4670K Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 1, 2013 10:00 AM ESTFinal Words
I’m a fan of Haswell, even on the desktop. The performance gains over Ivy Bridge depend on workload, but in general you’re looking at low single digits to just under 20%. We saw great behavior in many of our FP heavy benchmarks as well as our Visual Studio compile test. If you’re upgrading from Sandy Bridge you can expect to see an average improvement just under 20%, while coming from an even older platform like Nehalem will yield closer to a 40% increase in performance at the same clocks. As always, annual upgrades are tough to justify although Haswell may be able to accomplish that in mobile.
Even on the desktop, idle power reductions are apparent both at the CPU level and at the platform level. Intel focused on reducing CPU power, and it seems like Intel's motherboard partners did the same as well. Under load Haswell can draw more power than Ivy Bridge but it typically makes up for it with better performance.
Overclockers may be disappointed at the fact that Haswell is really no more of an overclocker (on air) compared to Ivy Bridge. Given the more mobile focused nature of design, and an increased focus on eliminating wasted power, I don’t know that we’ll ever see a return to the heyday of overclocking.
If the fact that you can’t easily get tons of additional frequency headroom at marginal increase to CPU voltage is the only real downside to the platform, then I’d consider Haswell a success on the desktop. You get more performance and a better platform at roughly the same prices as Ivy Bridge a year ago. It’s not enough to convince folks who just bought a PC over the past year or two to upgrade again, but if you are upgrading from even a 3 year old machine the performance gains will be significant.
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JDG1980 - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Those tests you linked are purely synthetic benchmarks. Has anyone found a significant real-world application where Haswell is slower than SB/IB at the same clock speed?krumme - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Has anyone found a significal real-world application where Haswell matter?smilingcrow - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Has anyone found a significant real-world comment from you that matters?rupert3k - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
*high fives*Aditya211935 - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
http://www.techoftomorrow.com/2013/pc/intel-haswel...This One is pretty nice.
Altough the list of games given there is a bit shallow but still it gives you a general idea.
jeffkibuule - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Haswell isn't just about the CPU, it's about the entire platform of chips, even the tiny ones on the motherboard no one really cares about. And I'm not sure what you were expecting in terms of performance gains, as there isn't any competition in the desktop arena for it to be worth pushing out 20-25% gains (and certainly not on a yearly basis).As far as active power goes, the entire point of a modern CPU architecture is to "hurry up and go to sleep (HUGS)". Faster you go to idle and the better idle performance you have, the better battery life you get because lets face it, unless you're encoding a video or playing a game, your CPU spends most of its idling doing nothing.
B3an - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
You're right. If anyone is to be blamed for the slight performance increase of Haswell, it's AMD. If AMD could actually compete on performance we would be seeing more gains with Haswell, and maybe FINALLY more than 4 cores on mainstream Intel platforms.DeadlyRicochet - Tuesday, June 4, 2013 - link
And I wonder how successful AMD would have been if Intel never stole their revenue (when AMD chips were faster than Intel, around 2006) by making under the table deals with OEMs to use Intel only CPUs.deepblue08 - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
I disagree somewhat. Especially with the fact that you think idle power consumption is unimportant. Keep in mind, that at least half of the time, when you are working, browsing the net, your cpu is in fact idle. So an improvement in idle performance consumption is a big deal imo.Hector2 - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
You've got it all wrong. Haswell won't be going up against ARM in tablets. Don't look for it in smartphones either ! LOL A Haswell i7 is serious overkill for those markets. ARM won't be getting into the serious laptop & PC market soon either --- they just can't compete well with Intel there. Intel is targeting their smaller & less power-hungry Atoms for the phone & tablet markets (surely you know this ?) that are driven by low power requirements. The press just leaked that Samsung's new Galaxy Tab 3 will have dual core Clover Trail+ Atoms