The Haswell Review: Intel Core i7-4770K & i5-4670K Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on June 1, 2013 10:00 AM ESTCPU Performance: Five Generations of Intel CPUs Compared
For the purposes of our look at Haswell, we will be breaking up our review coverage into two parts. The rest of this article will focus on the CPU side of Haswell, while coverage of the GPU - including Iris Pro and Crystalwell - has been spun off into another artice: Intel Iris Pro 5200 Graphics Review: Core i7-4950HQ Tested.
The majority of the market doesn’t upgrade annually, so I went back a total of five generations to characterize Haswell’s CPU performance. Everything from a 2.53GHz Core 2 Duo through Nehalem, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge and Haswell are represented here. With the exception of the Core 2 platform, everything else is running at or near the peak launch frequency for the chip.
In general, I saw performance gains over Ivy Bridge of 1 - 19%, with an average improvement of 8.3%. Some of the performance gains were actually quite impressive. The 7.8% increase in Kraken shows there’s still room for improvement in lightly threaded performance, while the double digit FP performance gains in POV-Ray and x264 HD really play to Haswell’s strengths.
Compared to Sandy Bridge, Haswell looks even more impressive. The Core i7-4770K outperforms the i7-2700K by 7 - 26%, with an average performance advantage of 17%. The gains over Sandy Bridge aren’t large enough to make upgrading from a Sandy Bridge i7 to a Haswell i5 worthwhile though, as you still give up a lot if you go from 8 to 4 threads on a quad-core part running heavily threaded workloads.
Compared to Nehalem the gains average almost 44%.
Quite possibly the most surprising was just how consistent (and large) the performance improvements were in our Visual Studio 2012 compile test. With a 15% increase in performance vs. Ivy Bridge at the same frequencies, what we’re looking at here is the perfect example of Haswell’s IPC increases manifesting in a real-world benchmark.
Gaming Performance
After spending far too much time on the Iris Pro test system, I didn’t have a ton of time left over to do a lot of gaming performance testing with Haswell. Luckily Ian had his gaming performance test data already in the engine, so I borrowed a couple of graphs.
As expected, Haswell is incrementally quicker in GPU bound gaming scenarios compared to Ivy Bridge - and most definitely at the top of the charts.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
210 Comments
View All Comments
smoohta - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Blah, seems like a rather shallow review:1. What about benchmarks to take advantage of the new AVX2 instructions? (FMA specifically would be interesting)
2. Same for TSX?
Klimax - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
I know only about x264 having it in the last versions. Not sure who else has it.Gigaplex - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
"Here I’m showing an 11.8% increase in power consumption, and in this particular test the Core i7-4770K is 13% faster than the i7-3770K. Power consumption goes up, but so does performance per watt."So... performance per watt increased by ~1%. For a completely new architecture that's supposedly all about power optimisation, that's extremely underwhelming to say the least.
Homeles - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Haswell is not focusing on the desktop I'm not sure how you managed to believe that it is.krumme - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Because Anand is a fan of it, even at desktop?MatthiasP - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
So we get +10% performance increase for +10% increase in energy consumption? That's rather disappointing for a new generation.jeffkibuule - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
Haswell is movinig voltage regulators that were already on the motherboard on die, so power consumption hasn't changed, it's just that the CPU cooling system has to deal with that extra heat now. Remember that those power ratings are NOT about how much power the chip uses, but how much cooling is needed.Homeles - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
System power consumption with Haswell is, in fact, higher. Take a look at page 2.Still, when you're running at these kind of frequencies, 10% more performance for 10% more power is a big deal. If you were to hold back the performance gains to 0%, power savings would be greater than 25%.
The only reason Piledriver was able to avoid this was because it was improving on something that was already so broken. AMD's not immune to the laws of physics -- when they catch up to Intel, they will hit the same wall.
Klimax - Sunday, June 2, 2013 - link
Most likely sooner, because they can't fine tune process.dgz - Saturday, June 1, 2013 - link
I agree but Intel has been doing that for many years. I just don't get what they're gaining by artificially restricting IOMMU support.