First complete review of Haswell i7-4770K

[cytg111]

Have any of you considered the crazy notion that if hexa-cores were mainstream, more software would be written to take advantage of hexa-cores?

software is just now beggining to tap into four cores .. until now there simply hasent been the demand.. demand is coming and supply will follow.

 

[ShintaiDK]

In this case laptops would move up to being tri or quad core, and more software would take advantage of that. There would be power savings from moving to more cores and away from higher clock speeds. Sounds like a win-win.

The sad reality of the situation is that Intel makes more money from smaller chips, so that's what we get - and the software is written for the lowest common denominator.

 

[cytg111]

..But only scales due to concurrent users...

Precisely, server workloads is a whole kind of different to user workloads.

 

[cytg111]

In this case laptops would move up to being tri or quad core, and more software would take advantage of that. There would be power savings from moving to more cores and away from higher clock speeds. Sounds like a win-win.

The sad reality of the situation is that Intel makes more money from smaller chips, so that's what we get - and the software is written for the lowest common denominator.

From a software engineering perspective, no, we dont have the tools yet to mindlessly tap int n cores for performance gains.. It is just not that simple and not so much of a needed paradigm shift rather that retooling our tools.. And it is happening. If we would go on for another decade with 'only' four cores, it wouldnt be that bad cause software is simply not there yet.

 

[SiliconWars]

You're never going to have the software if the hardware doesn't necessitate (or at worst, allow) it, that's the point.

With the next gen consoles being octo-cores, we will begin to see games becoming much better threaded. There has to be a hardware catalyst in order for the software to progress, and the hardware has to be mainstream in order for it to be economically viable.

 

[ShintaiDK]

You're never going to have the software if the hardware doesn't necessitate (or at worst, allow) it, that's the point.

With the next gen consoles being octo-cores, we will begin to see games becoming much better threaded. There has to be a hardware catalyst in order for the software to progress, and the hardware has to be mainstream in order for it to be economically viable.

Its first in the end of current consoles we even see quadcores being somewhat used. Even tho the consoles could manage 6 and 7? threads.

The 8 cores in PS4/Xbox Next looks more for the sake of marketing than usage. Just like previous consoles.

 

[SiliconWars]

I believe only 4 threads are available for gaming in the current gen consoles, the other 2 are reserved (not an expert on this by any means so correct me if I'm way off). There is also a big difference between true cores and hyperthreading.

 

[Cerb]

You're never going to have the software if the hardware doesn't necessitate (or at worst, allow) it, that's the point.

With the next gen consoles being octo-cores, we will begin to see games becoming much better threaded. There has to be a hardware catalyst in order for the software to progress, and the hardware has to be mainstream in order for it to be economically viable.

Begin to? We already have seen that. That's the here and now.

Look at the speedups v. cores v. clocks, and realize that you can't outrun Amdahl's Law. Games are usually a moderate-concurrency workload, so they'll scale better for awhile yet, in general (strategy are going to be harder than others). But, it's not going to happen over night, and throwing the hardware out there is only a small part of it--a part useful mostly for testing, ATM, and cheap for any major developer of games and/or game engines (FI, develop your future game engine with an 8C/16T Intel CPU, even though most users will have 2C/4T to 4C/8T).

We have it. There's just a mountain of code that was never intended to make use of it to get past, and new tools to make for better performance prediction and profiling...not to mention less shared data and gobs of locks and their brethren (threading on a very small number of logical CPUs, and threading across an arbitrary many CPUs, are vastly different).

 

[SiliconWars]

Nobody said it was going to be easy.

On the other hand, the company that makes the most of the PS4's or XBox Next's 8 cores is going to be in a good position. Look at what Crytek did in 2007 by making use of the hardware that was available.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Nobody said it was going to be easy.

On the other hand, the company that makes the most of the PS4's or XBox Next's 8 cores is going to be in a good position. Look at what Crytek did in 2007 by making use of the hardware that was available.

The difference between 4 and 8 cores in games will be very minimal. A slight speedbump to the quadcore and it leaves the 8 core in the dust.

You just cant get around Amdalhs law.

The scarpped Mitosis project is a nice example on the problem at hand.

Not to mention a fast dualcore is faster in almost everthing vs the weak 8 core PS4. Plus 1 core is for the OS only. So games can max use 7 cores on the PS4.

And even if we hypothetical imagine 8(7) cores will be used. We gonna sit with successors to Skylake and Skymont on 10nm by the time that the developers can make it reality.

 

[inf64]

I'm still amazed that some forumers @ AT think they now better than best of the best engineers who work at Sony and Microsoft and work there for years . It's just mesmerizing!

 

[ShintaiDK]

I'm still amazed that some forumers @ AT think they now better than best of the best engineers who work at Sony and Microsoft and work there for years . It's just mesmerizing!

Those "engineers" sure did well with the PS3 and Xbox360 in the technical matters. *cough*

Marketing and finance comes before any engineers in those 2 companies.

But again, IPC also increased!

 

[Cerb]

The difference between 4 and 8 cores in games will be very minimal. A slight speedbump to the quadcore and it leaves the 8 core in the dust.

You just cant get around Amdalhs law.

While true, consider that those faster 4 cores do not exist. While the consoles may have to work around having weak CPUs (when was the last time this wasn't the case?), we don't have ever-faster cores to work with. We're getting <10% IPC improvements, and very minor clock bumps, every 1-1.5 years. The options are to scale out (what they're doing, no matter the difficulty), work differently (???), or accept that they can't do anything more (unlikely). We used to get 50+% improvements in performance every ~2 years. Those days ended as of Nehalem, and they're not going to come back, until silicon gets replaced, if ever.

 

[ShintaiDK]

While true, consider that those faster 4 cores do not exist. While the consoles may have to work around having weak CPUs (when was the last time this wasn't the case?), we don't have ever-faster cores to work with. We're getting <10% IPC improvements, and very minor clock bumps, every 1-1.5 years. The options are to scale out (what they're doing, no matter the difficulty), work differently (???), or accept that they can't do anything more (unlikely). We used to get 50+% improvements in performance every ~2 years. Those days ended as of Nehalem, and they're not going to come back, until silicon gets replaced, if ever.

You can say we scale out, just without adding cores, with AVX2 and 256bit wide paths in the core.

But I agree, we are stuck so to say between chairs. Software dont scale and might never do so (For the wast majority.). Hardware with silicon seems to have hit the speed limit as well. And there is no fairy dust to fix it in sight.

The "50%" boosts ended way before Nehalem. It stopped at Conroe.

 

[inf64]

But again, IPC also increased!

Versus PPC crap we had before it sure did . And it increased a lot,so much that we will have an order of magnitude better ST performance with low clocked Jaguar Vs high clocked Cell/Xenon.

 

[AtenRa]

The difference between 4 and 8 cores in games will be very minimal. A slight speedbump to the quadcore and it leaves the 8 core in the dust.

Just shows that you haven't played BF3 MT (64 player open maps) with an 8 core/threat CPU.

Not all threads are equal.

 

[Enigmoid]

Not in a meaningful way.

Most laptops are dual core and more laptops are sold than desktops.

Leaving that aside, software these days is largely multicore optimised if the nature of the task the software performs, makes it viable.

I would say that a good chunk of laptop sales are quad core. Any a8 or a10 (including a lot of the new jaguar lineup) apu is a quad and a considerable number of i7's are sold (virtually every high end and not ultraportable laptop--basically any work or gaming laptop). Not to mention those i7's have HT.

 

[Riek]

It is important to keep in mind that a computer runs multiple applications at the same time.

While the speedup might be very difficult to reach for one program... running multiple intensive programs will take extra threads with pleasure.

The era where you ran 1 heavy application and went for a double cofee are over. Now you run multiple heavy applications at the same time and still do something usefull at your pc.

 

[galego]

Its first in the end of current consoles we even see quadcores being somewhat used. Even tho the consoles could manage 6 and 7? threads.

The 8 cores in PS4/Xbox Next looks more for the sake of marketing than usage. Just like previous consoles.

The 360 had three cores whereas the PS3 had one (plus six SPUs). That is why most games that are ported to PC work better with fewer cores, like the i5 and ignore the extra cores in a six or eight core FX chip.

As stated by Mark Cerny, the 8 cores in the PS4 were a choice of the game developers. No marketing here...

Next is the CPU profiling of a demo running on the PS4. Developers are already using 6 cores with easiness

It is important to keep in mind that a computer runs multiple applications at the same time.

While the speedup might be very difficult to reach for one program... running multiple intensive programs will take extra threads with pleasure.

The era where you ran 1 heavy application and went for a double cofee are over. Now you run multiple heavy applications at the same time and still do something usefull at your pc.

Yes. And this is why the usual benchmarking protocol used in most reviews sites of runing one benchmark, recording the score, runing another, recording the score... does not correspond to real usage of most of us. And if the benchmark used each time is an ancient single-threaded one such as wprime then the split from reality is much bigger.

 

[parvadomus]

The 8 cores in PS4/Xbox Next looks more for the sake of marketing than usage. Just like previous consoles.

Please, learn to develop video games, and then, came here a discuss which part of a video game cannot be paralellized. 99% of game code can.

BTW AMD did a great job with the PS4 and XBOX, it gave developers a powerful CPU, but with weak cores. Game engines will get multi-threaded very soon, as they wont get good performance with poorly threaded engines.
They almost ensured to get rid of CPU bottlenecks for their desktops procesors, as they are at least twice as fast as the PS4 CPU in MT or ST workloads. If a PS4 can play a game at 30fps it will run at least at 60fps in the PC version.

 

[blackened23]

Can we talk about this, like, when it actually happens? I'm sure the PS4 will be an amazing machine and I know I will buy one - but nobody wants to talk about theoreticals.

You're also ignoring the fact that this thread isn't devoted to gaming - last I heard, more folks than just gamers purchase desktop CPUs. So you can talk about what the gaming ramifications will be, which will be a complete waste of time because !) it hasn't happened yet 2) this thread isn't about gaming.

 

[frozentundra123456]

The 360 had three cores whereas the PS3 had one (plus six SPUs). That is why most games that are ported to PC work better with fewer cores, like the i5 and ignore the extra cores in a six or eight core FX chip.

As stated by Mark Cerny, the 8 cores in the PS4 were a choice of the game developers. No marketing here...

Next is the CPU profiling of a demo running on the PS4. Developers are already using 6 cores with easiness

Yes. And this is why the usual benchmarking protocol used in most reviews sites of runing one benchmark, recording the score, runing another, recording the score... does not correspond to real usage of most of us. And if the benchmark used each time is an ancient single-threaded one such as wprime then the split from reality is much bigger.

So galego, why dont you tell us what kind of cpu you are using and what software you are using that uses all the cores in whatever cpu you have?

 

[Khato]

Well, since this thread is about Haswell supposedly why not take it down this course instead? AMD's approach and that of the next generation consoles is to throw more cores at the problem and hope that programmers can extract the necessary parallelism in their code to make use of it. (As an aside, it's actually quite easy to use 8 cores in a game engine if you want to so long as you play with those extra threads in the proper sandbox.) Meanwhile Intel's approach starting with Haswell's TSX is to give developers the necessary tools to make better use of the cores/threads currently available.

It's all up to the programmers. Programmers who are likely rejoicing at the usage of an x86 based processor for the next generation consoles since everything I've heard was that the previous generation were miserable to code for. But there's still only so much easy parallelism to be found in a game engine, and my guess is that they'll take the easy route and either call it good if performance is acceptable or cut out features if it isn't. Then they'll rejoice at having five or six cores left to load up with physics and AI since that means they won't have to mess with the GPU.

 

[Piroko]

...realize that you can't outrun Amdahl's Law...

...
You just cant get around Amdalhs law...

Ahmdahl's law fails the moment you run two tasks at the same time. My Task manager tells me I run close to 70.

Just saying, Ahmdahl's law is a gross oversimplification and is missquoted more often than Moore's law.

 

[NTMBK]

That is not a good comparison in our discussion. Llano was the first on 32nm while Piledriver the second gen on 32nm. Llano is an APU, 4-modul Piledriver is a CPU product only.

I know that 4 module Piledriver was a CPU only product... That's why I compared it to the 2 module APU. :S

Good point about the process refinements though- GloFo's 32nm was pretty borked, so I wouldn't be surprised if they managed to improve it over the course of its life.