[VR-Zone] Mainstream desktop CPUs future evolution - Haswell

[sm625]

So motherboards will be even simpler with another 10% of their components hacked off the bill of materials. Great! I guess that means we can look forward to another 10% price increase!

 

[gevorg]

You can already do this with Celeron and Pentium SB-CPUs. Haswell derivitives would likely be even lower power with even better performance. Great HTPC options with this chip...

I know, but I was hoping with a decent performance like Core i3.

 

[intangir]

@lol123: why is limiting core counts on desktop the right way to go? Because AMD has ceded the high end, just like they did to nvidia in graphics. AMD's failure will be the end of our hobby...

It doesn't matter what AMD did; 8 cores is just not needed in the mainstream desktop. Intel saw this in 2006:

http://slashdot.org/story/06/07/27/1753255/intel---market-doesnt-need-eight-cores

TG Daily has posted an interesting interview with Intel's top mobility executive David Perlmutter. While he sideswipes AMD very carefully ('I am not underestimating the competition, but..'), he shares some details about the successor of Core, which goes by the name 'Nehalem.' Especially interesting are his remarks about power consumption, which he believes will 'dramatically' decrease in the next years as well as the number of cores in processors: Two are enough for now, four will be mainstream in three years and eight is something the desktop market does not need."

Full interview here: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/tgdaily-interviews-david-perlmutter,1855.html

 

[dma0991]

I wonder if there will be low-power Haswell variants that can be passively cooled even at load. Would be great for HTPCs without any fans or moving parts.

It would be very nice if they could do away with the heatsink altogether and have it cool enough to be like ARM chips. Those vents and fan on current x86 tablets are not appealing at all.

So motherboards will be even simpler with another 10% of their components hacked off the bill of materials. Great! I guess that means we can look forward to another 10% price increase!

Motherboard manufacturers would have to find new tactics to sell their product. Lets see...

Ultra Durable
Japanese
Military
Cars :biggrin:

 

[lol123]

Increased TDP can be used in many ways. The 35W version probably will have lower GPU clocks and lower CPU clocks. This will be usable at lower voltage and thus lower current. This would reduce VRM heat, GPU heat, etc...

Yeah, but that's just normal performance scaling, just like what we have today.

A VRM designed to handle 95W requirements is going to put out significantly less heat at 45W, and so the VRM budget will scale with the TDP, at least to some to extent. It's like a PSU, it's waste heat scales with the power required. Efficiency changes with load as well, but the major contributor to the heat the PSU produces is the amount of power it needs to provide.

You're right that VRM power consumption does scale with output, but it's still not a signifcant source of heat delta. Remember that not everything involved in voltage regulation is moved from the motherboard to the CPU (that wouldn't be possible, and it's enough to look at the components on the motherboard to be convinced of that), all that's changing as far as I can tell from the diagrams is that voltage regulation circuitry that is already on the CPU is being consolidated to one unit which will receive only one input from the motherboard. I don't see how this will greatly affect CPU power consumption, but there may be others here who can explain more definitively what we're looking at here.

Also, if you look at the existing lineup, the 2400s is slower than the 2500k on the CPU side, but also has half the EUs on the GPU side. All portions of the CPU are likely to scale up / down with the TDP.

I don't expect to see any dramatic differences in GPU performance across SKUs. If anything, Intel will want to assure that its cheaper and lower-power SKUs have decent GPU performance to compete with AMD Fusion. Actually, the ultrabook 15W SKU appears to have a more advanced GPU (GT3) than the desktop (GT2) and laptop SKUs (up to GT3).

 

[exar333]

I know, but I was hoping with a decent performance like Core i3.

Depends on what you need the performance for. The current SB derivitives are pretty good performers for the price. If rumors are to be trusted, IB/Haswell could be more overclockable than SB, so those cut-down CPUs could be very good again (like e21xx and e52xx).

 

[podspi]

=I don't expect to see any dramatic differences in GPU performance across SKUs. If anything, Intel will want to assure that its cheaper and lower-power SKUs have decent GPU performance to compete with AMD Fusion. Actually, the ultrabook 15W SKU appears to have a more advanced GPU (GT3) than the desktop (GT2) and laptop SKUs (up to GT3).

I saw that as well, kind of wondering how that is possible, and what those numbers mean. 15W for CPU and GPU aren't a lot...

My guess is that GT3 is the configuration of EUs, but the actual model will be slow, since it appears wide and slow (mhz) is the way to go for GPU.


Also, I expect (in general) that price and power will be inversely related at Intel :biggrin:. It will be interesting to see how Intel prices those newer 22nm Atoms... Nobody I know (except for me) requires Phenom II X6 level performance. Heck, most people I know (who are aware of quad-core and what it is) consider it overkill...

 

[Nemesis 1]

I'm happy to see there will be a 95W desktop SKU. That means they won't be completely focused on scaling down for power efficiency improvements. For 6 and 8 cores we will probably have to wait for the enthusiast/performance server lines, which I also think is the right way to go.

Also keep in mind that we very well might see 4-way hyperthreading as well as increased execution width in Haswell.

Yes and the 95watt unit is only GT2 were as the lesser wattage units will have GT3/GT2/GT1
So the 95watt unit isn't all about the graphics part of the chip .

 

[Don Karnage]

Because 4 fat cores (especially with improved SMT) are better than 8 weak cores. In the Haswell-E family there will definitely be an 8 core SKU, but that will be with a larger die, higher costs, somewhat lower clock frequency and higher TDP than in the mainstream line. Those are trade-offs that simply have to be made and I don't see why it is a problem that Intel provides both options to their customers.

AMD chose to combine all these trade-offs and resulting disadvantages in a single processor family (and with weak cores to start with) and the result is a disaster. I don't see how that helps the overclocking or enthusiast hobby at all.

SB-E will offer 8 core Xeon's so i imagine IB-E will offer 10 core Xeon's and so on.

 

[RobertPters77]

All's well that's Haswell.