Will Intel Broadwell Be Any Better Than Haswell?

[Mk pt]

The leap from Pentium 4 to Core was enormous. No matter how long it was worked on. Do you understand what I am talking about......? There are no buts.

There is buts.
The but of your ignorance about recent performance improvements.


My i7 920 is nice, but it get's is ass kicked by mobile Ivy Bridge and Haswell i7's, while the latest have less then half power consumption.

'No matter how long it was worked on', Nehalem to Haswell was an enormous leap too.

 

[mrmt]

'No matter how long it was worked on', Nehalem to Haswell was an enormous leap too.

People complaining about lack of progress in the CPU front never had to set up a server or use a notebook for traveling.

 

[Homeles]

People complaining about lack of progress in the CPU front never had to set up a server or use a notebook for traveling.

Indeed. Things have moved forward a lot from the Core 2 Duo days. Even on desktop.

However enthusiasts blind themselves by choosing to use performance as their only way to assess progress.

Core 2 Duo laptops are simply too slow to work on. Turbo boost is such a tremendous boost to performance... no mobile device should go without it.

 

[Keysplayr]

There is buts.
The but of your ignorance about recent performance improvements.


My i7 920 is nice, but it get's is ass kicked by mobile Ivy Bridge and Haswell i7's, while the latest have less then half power consumption.

'No matter how long it was worked on', Nehalem to Haswell was an enormous leap too.

wh

 

[Mk pt]

People complaining about lack of progress in the CPU front never had to set up a server or use a notebook for traveling.

And don't forget the lack of competition.

I believe that if lastest AMD cpu's were like Athlon's era, an i7 4770k would be $100 cheaper and $300 intel cpu by now would be a six core/12 thread i7.


Lack of competition in consumer-performance segment makes Intel concerned in lower power consuption segment. ARM cpu's are the consumer business real competition for Intel.



p.s.:

Congrats for those who are happy with AMD fail to stay competitive with Intel.
You pay more for less performance.

 

[ShintaiDK]

And don't forget the lack of competition.

I believe that if lastest AMD cpu's were like Athlon's era, an i7 4770k would be $100 cheaper and $300 intel cpu by now would be a six core/12 thread i7.



Lack of competition in performance segment makes Intel concerned in lower power consuption segment. ARM are the consumer business real competition for Intel.

Maybe you should look back on prices when we had competition. Prices have never been lower. And you would certainly not get a 4770K for 100$ less. More like 200$ more if we are to look back. And AMD tried to price their 4.7Ghz FX CPU at 800$+

And performance/watt is not something new. Its been the official prime goal since 2006

 

[witeken]

I agree with this. At least the possibility of it. Has all that could be done, been done in this architecture? All the tweaks that can be tweaked, tweaked?

According to an Intel architect in Reddit AMA, their CPUs will keep improving.

 

[Mk pt]

^ I think you should learn 'economic's 101'.

Is a fact that a competitive market has cheaper prices than a monopoly.
The more competitive a market is, more cheap prices are for consumer.

Only with illegal practices - like Intel, Microsoft and other 'big corporations' did some - the prices of a market with 2 or 3 key competitors may be higher compared to a monopoly situation:
the corporation in a monopoly situation crushes prices - selling products in a price point lower then the producing costs, taking losses, to crush any threat to is monopoly.



It's also a fact that AMD is a business corporation, not a solidarity institute.
If AMD can take more profit, they will. They will not lose money nor take $10 profit where they can grab $100 profit.

 

[mrmt]

Congrats for those who are happy with AMD fail to stay competitive with Intel.
You pay more for less performance.

Server workloads benefits *a lot* of core scaling, and people are willing to pay for more cores on the same number of sockets. Mobile is an entire new front, and there's plenty of money to be made if you get more performance with less power consumption. But what about the desktop? It doesn't benefit from core scaling as well as server workloads, and power consumption is not the deal breaker it is on the mobile market.

Desktop needs higher clocks and higher ST performance, both things that might hinder core scaling and power consumption, so we can say that the desktop is competing for resources against the server and the mobile market. If the desktop is competing, it must earn the companies more money than in those markets, and here the trend for the desktop business isn't good. The margins in the desktop are lower than in servers and in mobile, and in Intel's case the desktop volumes are already smaller than the mobile market. Why then should Intel focus on the dekstop? That's right, they shouldn't. And the future trends doesn't help. NUC is nothing more than bring a lot of the constraints and benefits of the mobile market to the desktop market, and workstations are using server processors since years ago.

In the end, the question is, are people willing to *pay* for better desktop processors? Given what we see in some threads here, people defending inferior processors for the sake of money not enough to buy a pizza, or worse, not enough to pay *the tip* for the guy deliverying the pizza, I'd say that they aren't. Desktop processors has become a race to the bottom, and soon it will become a place where companies dump trash silicon that doesn't qualify as a server or mobile part.

Is AMD weakness to be blamed for that scenario? No. AMD is a company in a dire situation, but given that Intel is focusing on other markets, the obvious answer for AMD would be to focus exactly where Intel isn't devoting efforts if there was money to be made there. The fact that AMD decided to focus on the penny-profits embedded market, says a lot about what the company expects from the desktop market. Whatever returns AMD expects from the desktop market, they are smaller than what they expect from the XBO/PS4 ROI, and embedded is *never* amont the top ROI projects a MPU company can think of.

 

[kimmel]

There hasn't been more competition for Intel in years. Qualcomm, Mediatek, Samsung, etc.... are vastly more qualified to drive down prices than AMD. You don't compete with Intel playing their game. You make up a new game and move the market to play by your rules.

Prices haven't been lower.
Performance has never been higher.
Power consumption continues to decrease.

In a galaxy not so long ago:
http://imgur.com/uKbCdJI

 

[jhu]

In a galaxy not so long ago:
http://imgur.com/uKbCdJI

What a bargain! But how many wait states does the memory have?

 

[Remobz]

If a person is buying a computer for the first time should they wait for broadwell to appear?

Or just buy a haswell now?

 

[OCGuy]

If a person is buying a computer for the first time should they wait for broadwell to appear?

Or just buy a haswell now?

Buy a Haswell.

 

[mrmt]

If a person is buying a computer for the first time should they wait for broadwell to appear?

Or just buy a haswell now?

Mobile? Wait for Broadwell. Desktop? Buy Haswell + dGPU if gaming.

 

[sxr7171]

The way I view it:

Haifa team: CPU core
Oregon team: Platform bottlenecks

They both are very important to Intel in the long term. Nehalem itself wasn't significant either. Single thread IPC was only 5% or so(plus Turbo). But Hyperthreading, integrated memory controller, and QPI was a big thing for servers.

Haswell is similar. It brought radically lower idle power use, FiVR for fine grained power management, which enhanced notebooks(well actually for the U and Y chips) greatly. Again, not something enthusiasts are looking towards to.



Pentium 4 sucked though. Almost horrible?

Core 2 brought ~20% improvement over Core Duo. That's not something "magical". But because Pentium 4 derivatives were so bad, it looked that much better.

Again, to make it "seem" like a big improvement, Intel can do the same thing. Cap the cores and do improvements all at once. What's the point though? Results are same.

Remember the comparisons are always made versus the BEST. Core 2 in reality succeeded Athlon 64-based chips.

I think it was purely a marketing decision. They just wanted higher clock speeds to sell computers. That's why when they went back to core (which mobile users were using the whole time in pentium M guise) they had to name the processors with three digit numbers that didn't reveal actual clock speeds. We still suffer with that. When I see an intel proc name I have to look up its clockspeed and turbo speed.

They wanted 4ghz so badly. And never hit it. They didn't really think about the future. Can't blame the Oregon team for doing what they were told.

 

[tential]

Indeed. Things have moved forward a lot from the Core 2 Duo days. Even on desktop.

However enthusiasts blind themselves by choosing to use performance as their only way to assess progress.

Core 2 Duo laptops are simply too slow to work on. Turbo boost is such a tremendous boost to performance... no mobile device should go without it.

I'm still using my Core 2 Duo laptop and am VERY happy. The Core 2 Duo was such a huge leap. It's the bare minimum you can use now a day though. Haswell had me EXCITED. Broadwell does as well. I'm already happy with my desktop performance so I'm happy intel has focused on mobile. Considering how weak the Xbox One and PS4 are, I wouldn't be surprised if 2-3 years down the line from here we get laptops that easily exceed Xbone/PS4 performance for under 1K, in a relatively thin/light case. My brother's laptop is 5 lbs and is VERY fast. He didn't even have the option of Nvidia's new and improved Maxwell GPU. I'm excited. I wanted a new laptop but Broadwell's quick time to release made me wait. I hope it's worth it.

If broadwell can increase batterylife even 10-15% and add some new features I'd be happy.

Edit: Just saw the Pentium M post. Pentium M was great. I played GTA San Andreas on it. Low quality graphics and all but Pentium M was able to play GTA San Andreas for a whole plane ride. Definitely was a huge jump.

 

[OCGuy]

I'm still using my Core 2 Duo laptop and am VERY happy. The Core 2 Duo was such a huge leap. It's the bare minimum you can use now a day though. Haswell had me EXCITED. Broadwell does as well. I'm already happy with my desktop performance so I'm happy intel has focused on mobile. Considering how weak the Xbox One and PS4 are, I wouldn't be surprised if 2-3 years down the line from here we get laptops that easily exceed Xbone/PS4 performance for under 1K, in a relatively thin/light case. My brother's laptop is 5 lbs and is VERY fast. He didn't even have the option of Nvidia's new and improved Maxwell GPU. I'm excited. I wanted a new laptop but Broadwell's quick time to release made me wait. I hope it's worth it.

Most noticeable thing you can do to a aging laptop is throw in a SSD. I've extended the life of countless older C2D and Pentiums for friends, family, and work.

I really don't know that waiting almost a year from today for Broadwell is worth it over a current Haswell offering in a laptop.

 

[Mand]

Why do people think that lower power consumption is something that we folk shouldn't care much about?

Lower power consumption is fewer watts your cooler has to dissipate, meaning more performance per TDP. Any situation where your chip is thermally limited and lower power consumption translates into improved performance cap.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Why do people think that lower power consumption is something that we folk shouldn't care much about?

Lower power consumption is fewer watts your cooler has to dissipate, meaning more performance per TDP. Any situation where your chip is thermally limited and lower power consumption translates into improved performance cap.

It also gives lower energy bill, less noise and less affection of the indoor climate

 

[coercitiv]

Maybe you should look back on prices when we had competition. Prices have never been lower.

Prices at launch as mentioned in Anandtech reviews:

Intel C2D E6600 $316
Intel Core i7-920 $284
Intel Core i7-2600K $317
Intel Core i7 3770K $313
Intel Core i7-4770K $339

The Pentium D 820 processor debuted at $241, putting it at about the same price as a single core Athlon 64 3500+. By the time Core 2 Duo launched,Intel Pentium D 945 was available for $163, Pentium D 820 had fallen to $113.

"Prices have never been lower".

 

[erunion]

Prices at launch as mentioned in Anandtech reviews:

Intel C2D E6600 $316
Intel Core i7-920 $284
Intel Core i7-2600K $317
Intel Core i7 3770K $313
Intel Core i7-4770K $339

The Pentium D 820 processor debuted at $241, putting it at about the same price as a single core Athlon 64 3500+. By the time Core 2 Duo launched,Intel Pentium D 945 was available for $163, Pentium D 820 had fallen to $113.

"Prices have never been lower".

The Pentium D, like the AMD 8150 more recently, went through price drops because its performance was poor.

 

[coercitiv]

The Pentium D, like the AMD 8150 more recently, went through price drops because its performance was poor.

You mean because it got beaten by competition.

 

[ShintaiDK]

Prices at launch as mentioned in Anandtech reviews:

Intel C2D E6600 $316
Intel Core i7-920 $284
Intel Core i7-2600K $317
Intel Core i7 3770K $313
Intel Core i7-4770K $339

"Prices have never been lower".

Let me correct it for you.

Intel C2D E6700 $530
Intel Core i7-870 $562
Intel Core i7-2600K $317
Intel Core i7 3770K $342
Intel Core i7-4770K $339

And thats even without accounting for inflation.

So yes, its never been cheaper.

 

[jhu]

Let me correct it for you.

Intel C2D E6700 $530
Intel Core i7-870 $562
Intel Core i7-2600K $317
Intel Core i7 3770K $342
Intel Core i7-4770K $339

And thats even without accounting for inflation.

So yes, its never been cheaper.

According to wikipedia (list of core 2; list of core i7):
Core 2 Duo E6700: $316
Core i7 870: $562
Core i7 2600K: $317
Core i7 3770K: $313
Core i7 4770K: $339

 

[ShintaiDK]

The wiki is wrong as usual.

The E6700 launched at 530$:
http://www.anandtech.com/show/2045/2

And the 3770K is 342$ boxed.
http://ark.intel.com/products/65523/Intel-Core-i7-3770K-Processor-8M-Cache-up-to-3_90-GHz