How is Haswell's (mobile version) performance compared to Ivy Bridge?

[silentmemories]

I'd like to defer to your expertise on whether I should purchase a new laptop (MacBook Pro 15") this year.

The new MacBook Pros are likely to come with the new Ivy Bridge chipset, but I'd like to know whether it would be worth waiting for Haswell to come out. People have said that it'd be better to wait a year for Haswell, but I've taken a look at the Wikipedia page as well as a short article from AnandTech on it but cannot see why it is that significant of an update (As compared to Ivy Bridge from Sandy Bridge, which is a die shrink, if I recall.).

Thanks in advance.

 

[krnmastersgt]

Its the standard release pattern for Intel, the tick-tock.

Sandy Bridge was a new architecture, then Ivy Bridge was the die shrink for SB, whereas Haswell will be the tick and introduce a new architecture (and a new socket type). No way of really telling the performance increases you'll see in a laptop as of right now.

 

[Charles Kozierok]

It's too early to say. The few people who at this point would be capable of answering this question are contractually bound not to do so.

 

[mfenn]

It's too early to say. The few people who at this point would be capable of answering this question are contractually bound not to do so.

:thumbsup: Very true.

 

[ElFenix]

i'm going to guess haswell won't be a major shot in the arm for sheer performance, aside from any sort of gpu computing becoming more commonplace (gpu might just be another functional unit of the cpu). but it'll be good jump in performance per watt (which ivy isn't, compared to sandy). so, lower power requirements, lower cooling requirements, means same battery life in a smaller chassis. intel wants haswell in tablets because they know that's where much of the growth is coming in the next 5-10 years.

about 2 years ago amd had a graphic that set out the proposition that a processor architecture can basically scale power within 1 order of magnitude and still be a good overall architecture for much of that range. you see this with sandy/ivy (which are pretty much the same architecture). the lower power parts on ivy can run down to 13 watts, while the upper range for sandy quads is right at 100 watts. for haswell, intel is probably aiming for something like 4 or 5 watts, maybe lower, for low power mobile parts, and up to 50s, maybe lower 60s for desktop parts. below that you'll need some new atom variant.

 

[silentmemories]

Thanks for the answers guys. I'll just wait 1 year and see how it is then. Not in a hurry to get a new laptop.

 

[cytg111]

edit : redundant, ignore.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Haswell will be more revolutionary on the mobile than desktop. So much is sure

 

[firewolfsm]

For any laptop using integrated graphics, a wait might be worth it.

It has 40 shaders, compared to 16, and they should be faster individually as well. It should also have an L4 cache, I'm not sure if the CPU can also access it, but it's an off-die, on-package SRAM module with at least 64MB of very fast memory for graphics. It should be 3-5 X faster than Ivy Bridge in this respect.

The 22 nm process should hopefully be less power hungry by then too.