Intel's Haswell Architecture Analyzed: Building a New PC and a New Intel

245 Comments

View All Comments

• TeXWiller - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link

  Perhaps they also try to reach lower usable clock frequencies through performance upgrades and this way gain some additional voltage scaling, or what is left of it.

• vegemeister - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link

  >think loop counters which store an INT for loop iteration then perform some FP calcs
  
  If updating the loop counter us taking a substantial fraction of the CPU time, doesn't that mean the compiler should have unrolled more?

• Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link

  The high end desktop space was abandoned quite a while ago. The LGA-2011/Extreme platform remains as a way to somewhat address the market, but I think in reality many of those users simply shifted their sights downward with regards to TDPs. A good friend of mine actually opted for an S-series Ivy Bridge part when building his gaming mini-ITX PC because he wanted a cooler running system in addition to great performance.
  
  To specifically answer your question though - the common thread since Conroe/Merom was this belief that designing for power efficiency actually means designing for performance. All architectures since Merom have really been mobile focused, with versions built for the desktop. I like to think that desktop performance has continued to progress at a reasonable rate despite that, pretty much for the reason I just outlined.
  
  Take care,
  Anand

• csroc - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link

  Sandy Bridge E just seems to price itself out of being reasonable for a lot of people. The boards in particular are rather steep as well.

• dishayu - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link

  Well, LGA2011 is bit of a halo product with no real substance. An ivy bridge 3770K will stand up to a quad core LGA2011 part nicely, not to mention it supports PCI e gen3, so even though it has lesser lanes, it doesn't have a bandwidth disadvantage. Moreover LGA2011 is still stuck at sandy based architecture, so that again isn't quite on the bleeding edge and as far as i understand, Haswell will come out before IB-E does, so it's 2 full cycles behind.

• Kevin G - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link

  For a single discrete GPU, Ivy Bridge would be able to match the bandwidth of Sandy Bridge-E: a single 16 lane PCI-E 3.0 connection. Things get interesting when you scale the number of GPU's. There is a small but clear advantage to Sandy Bridge-E in a four GPU configuration. Ivy Bridge having fewer lanes does make a difference in such high end scenarios.
  
  For its target market (mobile, low end desktop), Ivy Bridge is 'good enough'.

• vegemeister - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link

  Quad core LGA2011 is kind of a waste though. If you're already paying extra for the socket, my philosophy is go hexcore and 8 DIMMs or go home.

• Peanutsrevenge - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link

  Given that desktop software's not really been pushing for better CPU performance, the direction intel has taken is not a bad one IMO either.
  It's now possible to build a mighty gaming rig in an mITX case (Bit Fenix Prodigy), think 3770K and GTX 690 gfx and watercooled.
  
  A rig like that will likely last 3 years before settings have to be tweaked to keep 60+ fps.
  
  What's really needed is for software to take advantage of GPUs more, (which would play into AMDs hands), but I fear many of the best coders have switched from windows to Android/iOS development, With windows 8 shipping shortly, that number will increase further.

• j_newbie - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link

  I think that is quite sad.
  
  I for one always need more FLOPS, MCAD work and simulation work depends on two things memory bandwidth+size and flops, surprisingly AMD still offers a better vfm deal in this space thanks to avx instructions not being widely adopted into most FEA/CFD code yet and the additional ram slots you get with cheaper boards.
  
  Server components are always overpriced as we dont need a system to last very long.
  my 3930k setup is about 1.5 times faster than the x6 setup at 3 times the cost... :(

• Peanutsrevenge - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link

  You're talking more of a workstation than a desktop. Hence my use of the word 'desktop'.