Intel Haswell

[mnm0710]

Looks like Intel's Haswell family of processors will only be releasing at Computex 2013 versus CES. Sometime between May 27th and June 7th it appears. I think many people were hoping it would release around March but it does not appear to be the case :(

Haswell Launch Delayed

[Dave :)]

Shame, seems like the lack of competition from AMD is meaning that Intel can relax a bit. Although, ARM is coming up so hopefully that might bolster them a bit more. That, or Intel are just fine tuning their CPUs to make for a much smoother release..here's hoping. :)

[Nertballs]

will haswell be upgrade worthy from sandy bridge you think? like ivybridge wasn't a worthwhile upgrade from sandybridge?

[Dave :)]

It should be, IB was more of tick, where as Haswell will be a 'tock'. Are you familiar with Intel's 'tick tock' approach?

[Nertballs]

yep i am, tock is new architecture whereas tick is more of a shrinking process i think?

[paddytokey]

If it's for gaming, I don't think you will need to upgrade. Sandy still kicks ass and I am going to keep my I5 for a while I guess.

[Dave :)]

yep i am' date=' tock is new architecture whereas tick is more of a shrinking process i think? [/quote']

Yep, that's right. So Sandy Bridge was a tock because it was anew architecture, whereas Ivy Bridge is tick because it is on a smaller die. ( 22nm ).

So Haswell will be a brand new architecture on 22nm process, if the performance gains are anything like they were between Nehalem > Sandy Bridge then you can expect good things.

[Nertballs]

If it's for gaming' date=' I don't think you will need to upgrade. Sandy still kicks ass and I am going to keep my I5 for a while I guess.[/quote']

i was thinking that! even my 2500k at 4ghz kicks ass!

[LaiLaiNoob]

Are you sure? I hope not... ): I really need an upgrade from my 955BE

[Dave :)]

Are you sure? I hope not... ): I really need an upgrade from my 955BE

No one can be sure until it's released, but going off past experience, you would expect a good upgrade, especially from your Phenom 2.

[LaiLaiNoob]

Are you sure? I hope not... ): I really need an upgrade from my 955BE

No one can be sure until it's released' date=' but going off past experience, you would expect a good upgrade, especially from your Phenom 2.[/quote']

Let's hope so. I'm hoping to overclock the living daylight out of it :)

[ionbasa]

Haswell is a different architecture based off of Ivy, like Nehalem before Sandy Bridge, but so far the rumors floating claims10% better IPC per clock, but take that with a grain of salt because the instructions per cycle hasn't increased from Kentsfield, Yorkfield, Nehalem, Westmere, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge.

This is all speculation of course.

[TechFan@ic]

Performance gains are supposed to be 10-15% just like the jump from bulldozer to piledriver, which isn't very encouraging .

[Ghost]

If they change the sockets I doubt very many people will upgrade. A motherboard AND a CPU is huge and expensive upgrade. Especially as there won't be much choice in motherboards.

[deafboy]

~10% IPC bump and a bigger jump for the IGP... meaning it's not really worth it for most gaming users in my opinion. Great HTPC/mobile processor though.

[tg31270]

Will the new socket replace the 1155 "mainstream" platform for gaming?

[mnm0710]

Will the new socket replace the 1155 "mainstream" platform for gaming?

Yes the new socket 1150 is meant to be another replacement for Intel's mainstream platform. So those who are looking at upgrading from Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge (or anything earlier) will have to buy a new motherboard and processor.

[ionbasa]

Performance gains are supposed to be 10-15% just like the jump from bulldozer to piledriver' date=' which isn't very encouraging .[/quote']

Haswell is a width improvement where Broadwell will be your frequency improvement, seeing any gain at all is better than no gain.

[TechFan@ic]

I want to see more of a jump like we've seen between the i7 920 and the i7 2600K .

[ionbasa]

I want to see more of a jump like we've seen between the i7 920 and the i7 2600K .

Most likely that is going to be Broadwell. If Intel follows Tick-Tock, then we should expect 4GHz chips.

[TechFan@ic]

I want to see more of a jump like we've seen between the i7 920 and the i7 2600K .

Most likely that is going to be Broadwell. If Intel follows Tick-Tock' date=' then we should expect 4GHz chips.[/quote']

I highly doubt that as the jump from the 2500K (sandy bridge) to the 3570K (ivy bridge was ignorable), the main improvements were in the iGPU .

[ionbasa]

I want to see more of a jump like we've seen between the i7 920 and the i7 2600K .

Most likely that is going to be Broadwell. If Intel follows Tick-Tock' date=' then we should expect 4GHz chips.[/quote'] I highly doubt that as the jump from the 2500K (sandy bridge) to the 3570K (ivy bridge was ignorable), the main improvements were in the iGPU .

Of course there wasn't any real improvements in Ivy Bridge as it was a "Tick" aka die shrink with no new microarchitecture, but following the tick-tock cycle (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Intel_Tick-Tock) we can see that Haswell will have a new microarchitecture, but broad well will have the die shrink. If you look at the believed specs for Haswell you will see it is supposed to have AVX2 along with an improvement in the instructions decode queue:

VS:

And the execution engine:

VS:

Also Haswell is going to have more floating-point operations per second

So in conclusion Haswell will have a new microarchitecture but same clock speeds as it can have more instruction per clock, meaning better efficiency. Aka better performance W/o increasing clock speeds.

But Broadwell will *hopefully* have a clock increase(maybe FSB), as no new microarchitecture is being implemented, and they need to provide a performance increase without re-designing the chip. One thing to note is that Haswell may move some of the VRMs from the motherboard to the actual CPU die area so we may get better voltage controls hopefully meaning higher overclocks.

Sources used:

http://www.anandtech.com/show/6355/intels-haswell-architecture/

[deafboy]

Most of Haswell's improvements will be moot until a fair amount of code is recompiled to utilize some of the improvements.

[ionbasa]

Most of Haswell's improvements will be moot until a fair amount of code is recompiled to utilize some of the improvements.

Only in terms of AVX2 and FMA because no other CPU currently has those instruction sets therefore nobody has programmed for them. All other operations should get a boost also w/o any re-coding because of the changes in the front end and the execution engine.

[deafboy]

Most of Haswell's improvements will be moot until a fair amount of code is recompiled to utilize some of the improvements.

Only in terms of AVX2 and FMA because no other CPU currently has those instruction sets therefore nobody has programmed for them. All other operations should get a boost also w/o any re-coding because of the changes in the front end and the execution engine.

Agreed, but will be needed nonetheless to really show the improvements over the current gen. A simple IPC increase isn't all that special or even needed over current gen parts. I just think Haswell is getting a lot of hype and there are going to be some disappointed people out there.