ETA on Haswell?

Sylosis

Junior Member
Jul 6, 2012
3
0
0
Hello,
Long time lurker first time poster here.

Given that engineering samples of Haswell have already been leaked (http://pile.io/z47D) when do you guys think it will be released?

I remember Intel saying that the tri-gate transistors will evolve further to correct some of the shortcomings of Ivy Bridge regarding overclocking. Imo the big win will be for notebooks, where you will be able to get a quadcore plus a decent gfx in a 25W thermal envelope.

Hoping for an early release... IB was a disappointment for me.
 

Axon

Platinum Member
Sep 25, 2003
2,541
1
76
It's going to be a while, probably at least a year. IB is not a bad option if you need a solution now, but I also anticipate Haswell will be a considerable improvement.
 

BenchPress

Senior member
Nov 8, 2011
392
0
0
Given that engineering samples of Haswell have already been leaked (http://pile.io/z47D) when do you guys think it will be released?
Q2 2013 would be my guess. They still have to ramp up 22 nm production and Haswell has a ton of new features which need rigorous testing and tweaking.
I remember Intel saying that the tri-gate transistors will evolve further to correct some of the shortcomings of Ivy Bridge regarding overclocking.
There are no shortcomings of Ivy Bridge regarding overclocking. It was simply tuned for low power consumption (for ultrabooks), not high-end desktops. And with that in mind it overclocks absolutely fine. It was simply unrealistic to expect it to overclock higher than Sandy Bridge. And while I'm sure the tri-gate process will mature over time, they might use that headroom to further lower the power consumption instead of using it for higher clocks. After all you're getting other features to improve performance...
Imo the big win will be for notebooks, where you will be able to get a quadcore plus a decent gfx in a 25W thermal envelope.
There will be a big win for everyone. It has AVX2 and TSX to double the throughput and dramatically increase the multi-threading efficiency.
Hoping for an early release... IB was a disappointment for me.
You're only disappointed because you had wrong expectations. Don't expect Haswell to release early either, and you won't be disappointed by it.
 

Denithor

Diamond Member
Apr 11, 2004
6,298
23
81
There are no shortcomings of Ivy Bridge regarding overclocking. It was simply tuned for low power consumption (for ultrabooks), not high-end desktops.

...which is going to be the state of affairs for the foreseeable future. Desktops are going to be the ugly stepchildren of the pc world from now on, the afterthought instead of the market leader.

Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing, I think we will also see SFF become much more prevalent as well. There's so much unused space in typical desktop cases, just redesigning the layout to take advantage of lower thermal envelopes will be great.
 

Sylosis

Junior Member
Jul 6, 2012
3
0
0
Desktops are going to be the ugly stepchildren of the pc world from now on, the afterthought instead of the market leader

I don't think Intel is going to pull an Apple. They actually care about the high end/pro/server market, their market share is huge there and there's quite a lot of money to be made in that market.
 

exar333

Diamond Member
Feb 7, 2004
8,518
8
91
...which is going to be the state of affairs for the foreseeable future. Desktops are going to be the ugly stepchildren of the pc world from now on, the afterthought instead of the market leader.

Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing, I think we will also see SFF become much more prevalent as well. There's so much unused space in typical desktop cases, just redesigning the layout to take advantage of lower thermal envelopes will be great.

As long as they keep releasing enthusiast-level 'Xeons' for us who want the performance, I'm game. :)
 

BenchPress

Senior member
Nov 8, 2011
392
0
0
Desktops are going to be the ugly stepchildren of the pc world from now on, the afterthought instead of the market leader.
Not really. Like I said, Ivy Bridge overclocks absolutely fine. And desktop performance will still vastly increase with AVX2 and TSX. In fact TSX will be most relevant to multi/many-core desktop CPUs.

So it's all about making the right compromises, and Intel is currently mastering that very well, without discriminating the desktop market. They're also well aware of the halo effect of offering the highest performance desktop chips.
 

IntelEnthusiast

Intel Representative
Feb 10, 2011
582
2
0
While the computer market is going to continue evolve I think it is safe to say that we will continue to develop processors for the enthusiast space. The desktop space has gotten smaller in the last few years but only one area of desktop space has grown. I’ll give you one guess as to what area that is.
 

alyarb

Platinum Member
Jan 25, 2009
2,425
0
76
I don't think Intel is going to pull an Apple. They actually care about the high end/pro/server market, their market share is huge there and there's quite a lot of money to be made in that market.

Every aspect of the 22nm process is tuned to minimize leakage. Server chips are built on this same process, and with the advent of integrated voltage regulators you will see a likely permanent downward trend of current per socket across all of intel's CPU product families.

This doesn't mean overclocking is over, it means we are going to be overclocking lower current, lower leakage parts. And that's ok. For a minute there the k-series took all the sport out of it.

Christian is right. Of course there will be enthusiast parts. But intel is not going to incorporate those concerns into their CMOS development philosophy, and they really shouldn't. That whole way of thinking expired with Tejas.
 
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alyarb

Platinum Member
Jan 25, 2009
2,425
0
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"Mentioned when appropriate..."

No one brought it up though. We were discussing ETAs and then the OP threw out a reasonable speculation about power efficiency, and then you come in with your pitch about throughput, which you must admit came from another realm of discussion that was entirely unsolicited.

I understand you feel strongly about these features but regime changes do not happen overnight, and in that meantime you are going to have to be the community charlatan citing fringe cases and synth benches where these technologies perform exceptionally and somehow ignoring the cases where they do not. It's getting on everyone's nerves because there is actually a lot more to haswell than the two things you won't shut up about. People would go easier on you if you would talk about other things, but you don't. This is all you have to talk about, so irrespective of the validity of your posts, it *feels* like we have to sift through your spam to have a balanced topic-driven discussion with everyone else. I don't dislike you or anything like that. It's just the impression I get. And when you say "Deal with it," in the tone that you did, it really drags down the level of discourse and your repute.

If you want to admire intel for something, take note of the intermediate evolution of the core family that did so much for throughput while still confined to preexisting and shortsighted instruction set extensions. The fast radix divider, super shuffle engine, physical register file, and the uop cache all achieve better than linear improvements in throughput per joule and are universally applicable, particularly the uop cache which sees ~85% hit rate no matter your application. That is engineering to me; being a badass under incredible constraints.

To me, AVX and TSX are great technologies, but the instruction set and underlying hardware are brand new and being built and implemented together from the ground up, which is a bit less challenging and far less impressive to me than getting a better-than-linear improvement from a retrofit such as the radix-16 divider.

But yeah, just do a search. You mention TSX in almost every thread, sometimes even in a lazy unclear manner:

Mainstream Haswell chips will have 64 compute cores, made available through the AVX2 instruction set extension. It offers the best performance/Watt improvement imaginable.

And more cores is worthless without more multi-threaded software. Haswell also adds TSX technology to make that happen.

I mean come on. It reads like you are doing a crappy SEO job for someone. I don't mean to beat up on you, but the socket 1150 haswell will have a max of 4 physical cores with 2-way hyperthreading. Wider, smarter instructions can theoretically increase throughput to something equivalent to 64 simple cores, but that post right there remains completely unsubstantiated speculation and what's worse is you make the reader feel like they are being harassed by a door to door evangelist and there is no thread we can go in to get away from you. Stop promising something you have never seen. Stop it.

When you are old like me, it's more fun to just watch things transpire. Stop trying to make everyone think and feel the way you do. Personally I hope Haswell is a disgrace because I know intel will survive it and you may not and you'll learn more from that than from a bunch of people barking at each other who are more interested in being correct than being corrected.
 
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IntelUser2000

Elite Member
Oct 14, 2003
8,686
3,787
136
Hello,
Long time lurker first time poster here.

Given that engineering samples of Haswell have already been leaked (http://pile.io/z47D) when do you guys think it will be released?

Welcome to Anandtech forums Sylosis. :D

Vendors say anticipate first parts in Q2 with desktops and quad cores, Q3 with Ultrabook parts, and Q4 for the dual core SV parts. Don't expect them earlier. They always arrive later than you expect.

The engineering sample in your link is likely a fake. Leaked presentations show the Haswell EP to have 2.5MB L3/core and your link shows 4MB L3/core.

Imo the big win will be for notebooks, where you will be able to get a quadcore plus a decent gfx in a 25W thermal envelope.

Disappointment is due to big expectations. There are no quad cores planned for 25W. TDP is actually increasing by 2W for the non-ULV parts. Performance per clock should be similar to moving from Nehalem architecture to Sandy Bridge. That is, 10-15%.
 

bronxzv

Senior member
Jun 13, 2011
460
0
71
The engineering sample in your link is likely a fake. Leaked presentations show the Haswell EP to have 2.5MB L3/core and your link shows 4MB L3/core.

Indeed, also CPU-Z 1.61 supports Trinity so the FMA feature flag is missing in this Photoshop job (or was it Gimp?)


EDIT: CPU-Z 1.60 is also said to support Trinity but FMA isn't listed in the screenshots there:
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/a10-5800k-a8-5600k-a6-5400k,3224.html

So it's well possible that my remark above don't stand (i.e. CPU-Z simply don't detect the FMA flag at the moment)
 
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Sylosis

Junior Member
Jul 6, 2012
3
0
0
There are no quad cores planned for 25W. TDP is actually increasing by 2W for the non-ULV parts. Performance per clock should be similar to moving from Nehalem architecture to Sandy Bridge. That is, 10-15%.
Got a source for that?

To me it seems that Intel is pushing the programmable TDP feature so that vendors can fine tune it according to their needs. A nominal 35W quad core with a 25W underclocked mode doesn't seem far fetched to me.
 

dagamer34

Platinum Member
Aug 15, 2005
2,591
0
71
...which is going to be the state of affairs for the foreseeable future. Desktops are going to be the ugly stepchildren of the pc world from now on, the afterthought instead of the market leader.

Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing, I think we will also see SFF become much more prevalent as well. There's so much unused space in typical desktop cases, just redesigning the layout to take advantage of lower thermal envelopes will be great.

I feel like the market is reverting to a time when people had desktops only because of massive workstation-like needs. Does your average person really need a desktop if they aren't a) playing high end games or b) doing professional 2D or 3D work? My guess is no. Laptops already outsell desktops in the US, and that's where Intel's focus for power optimizations will lie for the forseeable future. We'll also see a strong push towards server chips to power the cloud back-end, but the typical desktop CPU won't get as much love as it did in the future.

The computer of the future will be a tablet PC that can dock into a station with an external GPU, monitor, and keyboard, and with configurable TDP and extra cooling, CPU power can ramp up to compensate. And with protocols like Thunderbolt, though it needs to mature, if we get 50-100Gbps external interconnects, the desktop as we know it is dead.
 

AtenRa

Lifer
Feb 2, 2009
14,003
3,362
136
People jumping to the "dead" bandwagon very easily lately. There will always be a need for a desktop PC. Gamers, power users, workstations etc.
 

Sable

Golden Member
Jan 7, 2006
1,130
105
106
Hello,
Long time lurker first time poster here.

Given that engineering samples of Haswell have already been leaked (http://pile.io/z47D) when do you guys think it will be released?

I remember Intel saying that the tri-gate transistors will evolve further to correct some of the shortcomings of Ivy Bridge regarding overclocking. Imo the big win will be for notebooks, where you will be able to get a quadcore plus a decent gfx in a 25W thermal envelope.

Hoping for an early release... IB was a disappointment for me.
Hadn't seen that benchmark score. Is it confirmed as real?

If so is Haswell gonna be 8 core 16 thread?! I thought it was only gonna be 4 core. Or is that a Xeon ES.
 

ShintaiDK

Lifer
Apr 22, 2012
20,378
146
106
The engineering sample in your link is likely a fake. Leaked presentations show the Haswell EP to have 2.5MB L3/core and your link shows 4MB L3/core.

Another confirmation that its fake is that there is no "4950K" in the CPU-Z binary. But there is for example "3570K". In other words, CPU-Z cant show 4950K.

So yes, 100% fake.
 

tommo123

Platinum Member
Sep 25, 2005
2,617
48
91
I feel like the market is reverting to a time when people had desktops only because of massive workstation-like needs. Does your average person really need a desktop if they aren't a) playing high end games or b) doing professional 2D or 3D work? My guess is no. Laptops already outsell desktops in the US, and that's where Intel's focus for power optimizations will lie for the forseeable future. We'll also see a strong push towards server chips to power the cloud back-end, but the typical desktop CPU won't get as much love as it did in the future.

The computer of the future will be a tablet PC that can dock into a station with an external GPU, monitor, and keyboard, and with configurable TDP and extra cooling, CPU power can ramp up to compensate. And with protocols like Thunderbolt, though it needs to mature, if we get 50-100Gbps external interconnects, the desktop as we know it is dead.

why pay extra for performance in a smaller space if you (like a lot of people)
don't plan on moving the computer? plus then there's the small screen.

for the price of a decent laptop (let alone good) you can get a much better PC with a 24" monitor and a hell of a lot more storage space (may or may not be a selling point depending on the individual).
 

BenchPress

Senior member
Nov 8, 2011
392
0
0
"Mentioned when appropriate..."

No one brought it up though. We were discussing ETAs and then the OP threw out a reasonable speculation about power efficiency, and then you come in with your pitch about throughput, which you must admit came from another realm of discussion that was entirely unsolicited.
I was merely pointing out to the OP that Haswell will be a big win not just for notebooks, but also for desktops, thanks to AVX2 and TSX. How is that not a valid point?
I understand you feel strongly about these features but regime changes do not happen overnight, and in that meantime you are going to have to be the community charlatan citing fringe cases and synth benches where these technologies perform exceptionally and somehow ignoring the cases where they do not.
I'm not ignoring that. CPUs are already great at ILP. AVX2 helps DLP and TSX helps TLP.
If you want to admire intel for something, take note of the intermediate evolution of the core family that did so much for throughput while still confined to preexisting and shortsighted instruction set extensions. The fast radix divider, super shuffle engine, physical register file, and the uop cache all achieve better than linear improvements in throughput per joule and are universally applicable, particularly the uop cache which sees ~85% hit rate no matter your application. That is engineering to me; being a badass under incredible constraints.
Excuse me but that would be totally off-topic! Those are past technologies. This is a thread about Haswell. So pretty please deal with it when AVX2 and TSX are being mentioned instead.

You have to realize that the days of big ILP improvements are numbered. DLP and TLP are much more promising for increasing performance at low power consumption. So it shouldn't be a surprise that Haswell adds technology to vastly improve on those aspects. If you know of ILP improvements in Haswell, please do tell.
To me, AVX and TSX are great technologies, but the instruction set and underlying hardware are brand new and being built and implemented together from the ground up, which is a bit less challenging and far less impressive to me than getting a better-than-linear improvement from a retrofit such as the radix-16 divider.
How is a radix-16 divider any more impressive than an eightfold improvement in gather performance? Also, a radix-16 divider only helps specific applications with lots of divisions, and only by a few percent (if that). Gather will help vectorize a lot of code that previously wasn't a candidate, which applies to a much wider range of applications and has a much greater effect.
I mean come on. It reads like you are doing a crappy SEO job for someone.
What's a SEO job?
Wider, smarter instructions can theoretically increase throughput to something equivalent to 64 simple cores, but that post right there remains completely unsubstantiated speculation and what's worse is you make the reader feel like they are being harassed by a door to door evangelist and there is no thread we can go in to get away from you. Stop promising something you have never seen. Stop it.
Stop calling it unsubstantiated when you either don't read what I write or don't challenge me to explain it. Four cores with two 8-element FMA units each equals 64 compute cores. It's the same logic used by GPU manufacturers, which is highly relevant given that AVX2 aims at the same type of SPMD processing found in GPUs. I'd be glad to give you more substantiation if you ask for it.
When you are old like me, it's more fun to just watch things transpire. Stop trying to make everyone think and feel the way you do. Personally I hope Haswell is a disgrace because I know intel will survive it and you may not and you'll learn more from that than from a bunch of people barking at each other who are more interested in being correct than being corrected.
I'm only interested in what's in future CPUs. So by all means, correct me if you think I'm wrong.
 

AtenRa

Lifer
Feb 2, 2009
14,003
3,362
136
Just to show that worldwide desktop PC shipments are expected to grow. Granted at a low rate but still they are rising.

It is only in the mature markets (US, Europe etc) that Desktop shipments are starting to decline.

http://www.idc.com/getdoc.jsp?containerId=prUS23371512
worldwidedesktoppcshipm.jpg
 

moonbogg

Lifer
Jan 8, 2011
10,731
3,440
136
Things may be slowing down here pretty soon anyway. Hope its OK to link to another site for an article. Basically it talks about hitting another wall with CPUs. This time its a core count wall and fast dminishing returns for general purpose tasks, gaming being one of them for sure and we're already seeing games suffer from this lack of multi core efficiency.

http://www.extremetech.com/computin...rom-one-core-to-many-and-why-were-still-stuck