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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winterspan - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
So, can someone catch me up with why Haswell isn't being compared to the older Core i7-39xx Sandy Bridge chips with 6 cores (Sandy Bridge E series)? Is it because they are based on the Xeon architecture and thus are not directly comparable? Will we see an Haswell-E (or Ivy Bridge E) series-based Core i7 with more than 4 cores as a follow-up to the Core i7-39xx?TomWomack - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
Yes, Ivy Bridge E should appear in the fall; it's not at present quite clear how many cores it will have, possibly only six with the 8- and 12-core units reserved for sale as Xeons.Asking anandtech.com/bench to compare a 4770K and a 3930X, Haswell wins on single-thread and loses on some multi-thread tests, which is what you'd expect.
Kevin G - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
Probably because it'd be embarrassed in some cases. For lightly threaded workloads, the i7 4770k would come out on top. The six core i7 39xx chips need heavily threaded applications to really shine. Also of note is that GT3e versions of Haswell have 128 MB of L4 cache which further improves IPC. A hypothetical 3.5 Ghz fully functional Haswell with GT3e and recompiled software will likely out run an 8 core socket 2011 Xeon.boe - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
Pretty much a big steaming pile of meh.They should have at least put more PCIe lanes on the thing otherwise it is just last years processor by another name.
milkod2001 - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
What revision of i7-4770K was tested here? There's been rumors about early Haswell revisions giving some problems to usb3 connected devices. When in sleep mode it can't wake up after that:http://www.tomshardware.com/news/Haswell-USB-3.0-S...
Would love to see some additional tests covering this problems to make sure I won't spend weeks sending faulty CPU back, waiting and all that s..t.
Diogenes5 - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
TIL that my 2-year-old i2500k still rocks it for the price and the overclock I have it at (beats any current gen processor for most tasks).Oscarcharliezulu - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
Thx for the review Anand, as always very thoughtful and well written. You always have a good mix of objective and intelligent subjective. Looking forward to Ivy-E now.psuedonymous - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
Dangit Anand! Why are you still using 2-pass encoding? Everyone and their dog have switched to the faster and more effective CRF. It may have some obscure use as a synthetic benchmark, but it's certainly not a real world one!skrewler2 - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
Pretty annoying they're still not including VT-d support in their K series.SanX - Monday, June 3, 2013 - link
Anand gets on my nerves lately. Smells like shill articles everything he personally covers.