[THG]Core i7-4770K: Haswell's Performance-Previewed

[Daedalus685]

Gotta say that I'm not as upset my Q9550's system MB croaked last fall resulting in a 3570K instead of the planned wait for this.

I'm sure I'm going to wish my Ivy powered X230 was haswell by the end of the year though... Looking like a very productive upgrade in the mobile markets. Specifically where a dedicated GPU doesn't fit with the form factor. Not that I ever game on my laptop as it is though.

 

[krumme]

According to an engineer from Intel Broadwell will bring bigger improvements to graphics than from Ivy Bridge to Haswell.

Ist a general rule from Intel, that the next GPU will be a hit. The rule have been in action since Intel740 i 1998.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740

"Released with enormous fanfare, the i740 proved to have disappointing real-world performance, and sank from view after only a few months on the market. Some of its technology lived on in the Intel GMA systems that continue to be sold to this day"

 

[Piroko]

GT2, think about GT3, then think about GT3 + Cristalwell. And in mobile AMD cannot count on exceeding TDP by too much as they do in desktops otherwise they are going to be sued.

Thought about it, no new conclusion. No reason to believe that Trinity runs beyond its TDP (mostly because battery life of tested notebooks is right where you'd expect it to find in comparison to tested Intel Notebooks), but IB does throttle its HD4000 below what benchmarks will make you believe. My (brand new, yey for me) Yoga 13 does not clock the HD4000 to or above 1 Ghz in Tera, even with cpu load in the low 30%s and temperature below 50°C. (also, even with minimum settings performance is horrible)

Conclusion: HD4000 is limited by TDP, GT3 will definitely increase performance per Watt by a considerable amount, but considering it's on the same process I'm not expecting miracles. You seem to do.

 

[cbrunny]

Haswell might not be the 'hoped-for' jump, but it isn't really logical to upgrade to old tech.

 

[krumme]

Interesting.

Yeaa, that was interesting, because frankly it was below our expectations even for the desktop side of things. There is nothing wrong in writing and admitting that.

(edit I guess its 22nm constrained or something like that - surely this is no SB - on any view)

 

[mikk]

Thought about it, no new conclusion. No reason to believe that Trinity runs beyond its TDP (mostly because battery life of tested notebooks is right where you'd expect it to find in comparison to tested Intel Notebooks), but IB does throttle its HD4000 below what benchmarks will make you believe. My (brand new, yey for me) Yoga 13 does not clock the HD4000 to or above 1 Ghz in Tera, even with cpu load in the low 30%s and temperature below 50°C. (also, even with minimum settings performance is horrible)

Conclusion: HD4000 is limited by TDP, GT3 will definitely increase performance per Watt by a considerable amount, but considering it's on the same process I'm not expecting miracles. You seem to do.

1 Ghz is no throttling. It's way above the base clock. Around 1 Ghz for ULV is the usual frequency.

 

[Maximilian]

In case you refer to my posting, he speaks about graphics improvements not CPU performance.

No i refer to the THG conclusion "making way for mobile"

 

[mrmt]

Ist a general rule from Intel, that the next GPU will be a hit. The rule have been in action since Intel740 i 1998.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel740

You have to concede that from GMA945 to HD4600 GT2 the performance improved far above the industry average. The simple fact that we are speculating whether Intel iGPU will beat AMD iGPU means something.

 

[Piroko]

1 Ghz is no throttling. It's way above the base clock. Around 1 Ghz for ULV is the usual frequency.

Throttling was probably a bad choice in words, but it will not hit its maximum turbo frequency even under close-to-perfect conditions. It is TDP limited by quite a lot.

 

[Khato]

No TSX on K chips = fail.

Given the fact that their chart also claims that a number of i7 chips will not support hyperthreading and those chips that supposedly do not have TSX match up perfectly with those that the vr-zone chart from December of last year states don't have TXT... Yeah, I'm thinking that chart in the Tom's article isn't exactly correct.

 

[beginner99]

Well disappointing if true.

Guess my money will finally go in a new display and the then required GPU upgrade and my i7-870 will stay. Haven't really felt CPU limited...only when playing around with blender fluid simulations...but thats at least an overnight job with pretty much any CPU available.

No TSX on K series. Typical intel BS.

 

[krumme]

Thought about it, no new conclusion. No reason to believe that Trinity runs beyond its TDP (mostly because battery life of tested notebooks is right where you'd expect it to find in comparison to tested Intel Notebooks), but IB does throttle its HD4000 below what benchmarks will make you believe. My (brand new, yey for me) Yoga 13 does not clock the HD4000 to or above 1 Ghz in Tera, even with cpu load in the low 30%s and temperature below 50°C. (also, even with minimum settings performance is horrible)

Conclusion: HD4000 is limited by TDP, GT3 will definitely increase performance per Watt by a considerable amount, but considering it's on the same process I'm not expecting miracles. You seem to do.

My experience with HD4000 in an ULV is the same.

Ofcource Intel can improve by going 14nm, but they need to seriously work on the efficiency of the GPU arc. Broadwell will hopefully introduce something radically new, because the EU is way outdated, especially compared to the über high-tech Intel wrap around it. And how safe would it be to rely on AVX2 to save them on the long run?

 

[Arachnotronic]

Well disappointing if true.

Guess my money will finally go in a new display and the then required GPU upgrade and my i7-870 will stay. Haven't really felt CPU limited...only when playing around with blender fluid simulations...but thats at least an overnight job with pretty much any CPU available.

No TSX on K series. Typical intel BS.

If you really need a drastic jump in CPU performance, buy a SNB-E or one of the upcoming IVB-E models.

 

[krumme]

You have to concede that from GMA945 to HD4600 GT2 the performance improved far above the industry average. The simple fact that we are speculating whether Intel iGPU will beat AMD iGPU means something.

Probably they have. Its been a long bumpy road for them but I am confident they will get there.

GMA945 was a very important thing for the mobile market, and at that time, it was quite respectable performance - for the cheap. GMA945 was the huge jump IMHO, it propelled the entire mobile market. It might be frowned upon, but i am sure there wont come another gpu product so important for the mass market.

 

[krumme]

If i recall correctly; wasnt it before the the Atom 2014 that we would see Intel use the trigate process highly integrated into the design?

If correctly, that probably means Broadwell will add that advantage, to the node change?

 

[Spjut]

Noob question from a noob: Are games using instruction sets such as SSE 3/4, AVX, FMA etc?
As you may guess, I wonder if AVX2(which sure has gotten alot of hype) can be used for games, and if it then can make a big difference

 

[mrmt]

If i recall correctly; wasnt it before the the Atom 2014 that we would see Intel use the trigate process highly integrated into the design?

IIRC HSW is optimized for finfets.

 

[Enigmoid]

Sorry, but I can't take that serious. The HD4000 takes quite the battery hit while gaming even though it's on the superior process. We're talking about the same node with even more integration eating into your TDP headroom, "eating AMD iGPUs for breakfast" would need a miracle even for Intels deep pockets.

The HD4600 - on Desktop - has 36% more shader power than HD4000 as well as more cache and probably a lot of other tweaks and look how far they got. A single game shows massive speedup (still not as fast as Trinity though), the other games show mediocre speedups (again, not as fast as Trinity). And this is a preview, probably with strict testing conditions set by Intel on a website not exactly known to look behind the curtains.

First this is with even pre-beta drivers (look at 7970 at release vs now and then compare it to an engineering sample of the 7970 which will be even lower) and with reduced bandwidth (about 19% less than IB will make a small but noticeable difference).

Thought about it, no new conclusion. No reason to believe that Trinity runs beyond its TDP (mostly because battery life of tested notebooks is right where you'd expect it to find in comparison to tested Intel Notebooks), but IB does throttle its HD4000 below what benchmarks will make you believe. My (brand new, yey for me) Yoga 13 does not clock the HD4000 to or above 1 Ghz in Tera, even with cpu load in the low 30%s and temperature below 50°C. (also, even with minimum settings performance is horrible)

Conclusion: HD4000 is limited by TDP, GT3 will definitely increase performance per Watt by a considerable amount, but considering it's on the same process I'm not expecting miracles. You seem to do.

richland is supposed to increase 20 to 40% in gpu performance over trinity

but gt3e might eat it for lunch, even kaveri...and many low end dGPUs

You do realize that richland is trinity with power optimizations/ bio tweaks and a slight boost in clocks. A couple hundrer mhz on the cpu and maybe 50mhz on the gpu. Maybe 5-10% faster.

Despite its four cores and relatively high clock frequency, the A10-4600M cannot compete with the processing power of Intel's fastest CPUs. At best, the APU is on the level of the older Core i3-2330M, but is often considerably slower. Interestingly, the Turbo frequency of 3.2 GHz, promised by AMD, is only kept for a split second even in single thread applications such as SuperPi. Most of the time we observed a stable 2.7 GHz, although with all cores under load we registered only the base frequency of 2.3 GHz. Apparently AMD has miscalculated the TDP of the chip - with just Prime95 running without any additional graphics applications, we notice a slight throttling to 2.2 GHz.

From notebookcheck on trinity tdp. Without the gpu enabled the chip can't even run at its rated clock speed.

 

[Ventanni]

Noob question from a noob: Are games using instruction sets such as SSE 3/4, AVX, FMA etc?
As you may guess, I wonder if AVX2(which sure has gotten alot of hype) can be used for games, and if it then can make a big difference

From my understanding, not really, as AVX2 concentrates on improving Floating Point (FP) performance, whereas most games are Integer performance limited.

 

[Arachnotronic]

From my understanding, not really, as AVX2 concentrates on improving Floating Point (FP) performance, whereas most games are Integer performance limited.

No, AVX2 does to integer what AVX did for FPU.

 

[Ventanni]

No, AVX2 does to integer what AVX did for FPU.

I stand corrected!

 

[Arachnotronic]

I stand corrected!

Glad to help!

 

[podspi]

I have a hard time believing that THG would post a preview like this w/out checking with Intel first. I mean, talk about burning bridges?

Anyway, the disappointing thing for me is Intel refusing to take advantage of all that thermal headroom desktops have. Yea, they give us the 'k' editions so we can take advantage of it ourselves, but then we lose TSX...

I'll probably still end up picking one of these up unless Steamroller is a very large improvement on Piledriver...

 

[Pheesh]

For those bemoaning the alleged lack of TSX- where do you think you would have gotten that benefit, and how pronounced?

 

[krumme]

IIRC HSW is optimized for finfets.

Hmm, I quite cant understand they can get there so fast?

But David Kanter writes the same here:
http://www.realworldtech.com/haswell-cpu/

"tailored to take advantage of Intel’s 22nm FinFET process technology"

Btw. a nice write of HSW as usual by DK.

Anyway, desktop performance is of minor importance and Intel already have superior cpu tech here, what matters is what HSW can bring for the mobile market. IB brought very good gains for the 17w tdp, lets hope HSW can do the same.