20w decrease in TDP is nothing to sneeze at for the Xeon variant. Intel builds the 2011 chips for Xeon, whatever increases the 4960x gets are a peripheral concern compared to the concerns of datacenter types who care a lot more about heat and power and support cycles than they do about a few megahertz.
Of course no reason to upgrade, but the gains will be higher.. the switch from SNB to IVB alone makes up for more than your estimate. Then there are ~100 MHz at similar price points and the CPUs should be able to hit higher turbo bins more often (if allowed to) due to the lower power consumption.
This is because the whole industry tries to persuade you, that all your needs can be met with less than 10 times the computing power and no storage(cloud nonsense). Don't seek the devil in dark alleys, for it is in the light of day it likes to hide.
I am still rocking a Pentium 4 single core @ 2.8GHz (Northwood) laptop. The motherboard is an Intel 845 chipset one. Lithography is 130nm and the socket is 478PGA. Date of production is third quarter, 2002. There is still absolutely no reason to upgrade as it rocks 2GB memory and it can run every business software in the market. In addition to working on it, I use it to watch movies while working out on the treadmill.
Pretty safe to say that if all of their customers were like me, Intel would have gone out of business.
It will probably take another 10 years before it gets obsolete.
if you got SB or IB, there is no reason to upgrade to haswell nor IB-E. its all the same recycled thing with better iGPU performance which only 1% of people care about. to be honest this is a good news for us as our CPUs will stick for a while before the next upgrade.
You could always choose to not upgrade your CPU in the past if you were happy with the perf. At least back then you had the option of shelling out more money for more perf. Now you can't.
In what sense? Some of the SNB-E parts might now be available for less, but otherwise these are the prices that are leaked. That's not the same as what you or I would pay when they ship, and since it's a leak there's inherently a level of "take this with a grain of salt" at play. VR-Zone might have made up prices, but I doubt that as well. IVB-E is a tough sell for SNB-E owners, and SNB-E and IVB-E are a tough sell for everyone, so having prices drop a bit wouldn't be surprising.
If you're talking about the current SNB-E prices vs. the listed, that's just a case of retail online prices being different from Intel's quoted prices (which probably aren't what most companies pay regardless). I've added the Newegg prices to the tablet for the SNB-E parts, though, just to help clarify things.
IVB-E won't be cheaper than SB-E but your news implies otherwise. I'm afraid they are a bit off, also you don't need a source to know that Intel will price them in a relatively similar range to its predecessor. In this case the source is nonsense, not only the prices are wrong also some of the frequency claims are wrong. A news based on such a flawed source doesn't make sense to me.
Do you have an alternative source? If so, I'd love to see it. Considering we're only a month out from the launch of these chips, I doubt these numbers are that far off.
And I am afraid you are wrong. "Intel will price them in a relatively similar range to its predecessor" - which is exactly what's in the table. There are also modest frequency boosts in Jareds version, which would make a lot of sense. It may not happen like this, but it sure looks plausible!
I agree, gone are the days of upgrading PC components every year (thankfully). I'm perfectly happy with my two year old 2600K and will probably keep it around for another 2 years. These days the performance of most ultrabooks is quite acceptable if you leave out heavy stuff like gaming and photo/video editing. The crappy performance and lack of upgradability were the reasons i never bought a laptop for myself but now..... Zenbook Infinity can't come soon enough!
I am using an i5 750K which is from 2009. I also use a GTX 560 Ti, bought just before the release of Battlefield 3 in late summer 2011. I also got 8 gigabyte of RAM in 2011, back when it was ridicolously cheap(I got it for 32 dollars in total).
I can still play Crysis 3 on medium, which is a game that doesn't really interest me anyway. It's actually quite amazing how things have stagnated. Good for my wallet but my tech nerd inside of me is wailing and cursing his fate.
I just don't see a reason to upgrade before I hit a wall. I hope that the next gen consoles will give me a reason, but since I mostly play RTS's or MMORPG's that will give me a prolonged life cycle.
I did buy Star Citizen, which should be taxing on most computers but we'll see how well they'll do. Im guessing pretty bad initial optimizations. We get the alpha this fall/winter and beta next year.
Or I could just get a PS4 (I skipped the previous console generation) since games will be optimized for them anyway, even though I like PC a lot.
Either way, my 2011 experience with the GPU or my 4 year old CPU has taught me that if you can time your purchases well, you can get away with using the same stuff for 3 years or so for the GPU or 5 years or so with the CPU. That gives you a lot cheaper upgrade cycle, but it also makes you very wary of upgrading since you don't wanna be that guy that uses a 1 monitor setup, buys a titan and then the 780 GTX shows up just a few months later with almost the same performance but with a significantly reduced price.
Hah guys I'm still on a Phenom II X6 CPU. I've considered an upgrade, and when the right price rolls around for some a sweet i7 build I might jump. Not looking forward to replacing all of the components, but it will make a different eventually.
Haswell performance is understated because of misleading benchmarks of applications that give the wrong impression of things.. Two days ago, I bought a new laptop with i7-4700HQ CPU vs the CPU I had previously, the i7-3610QM. http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-4700HQ-vs-In... is one such comparison But I'll share a few findings that don't match benchmarks. I code on V8(chromium code) and my compiles before took 1:10-1:15 this new laptop compiles the same code fresh in ~45 minutes... that's WAY better than 5% useless increase vs the misleading benchmarks I see places. Yes it's my use case but my findings show Haswell helps ALOT. and is a nice perf boost for my use case. ALSO my Samsung 840 Pro speed went up 15% because of the new chipset :) Ivy-Bridge = http://imgur.com/W9svCDT Haswell = http://imgur.com/wctqtdQ
Note: I don't keep the code I compile on the SSD, compiling is mainly CPU bound this generation and not really disk bound so the code is all on an HDD.
If you're comparing two different laptops with different chipsets, there's a lot more at play than just the CPU upgrades. I don't even know how CPU Boss tested those two chips, but depending on what you're doing Haswell is either slightly to moderately faster than Ivy Bridge. With a clean install of Win7 on a laptop vs. a typical OEM install on a laptop, or differing HDDs/SSDs, RAM, chipsets, etc. everything is subject to change.
Actually I just swapped out my Primary boot SSD + OS which is Win 8.1 of about a month old, so all software configs and compilation toolchain+compiler are identical. Mainly the massive difference is moving to the newer generation CPU+chipset but that enough has an astounding performance boost. It's ALL from the Haswell improvements with memory latency etc, it has made a larger impact for me than something like a Win(crap)RAR compression benchmark comparison :P I'm just saying my personal findings to be far more impressive and different than the benchmarks have noted what Haswell + what Haswell's plug into offer in terms of performance.
It sounds like your old laptop was probably throttling the CPU when all 4 cores/8 threads were loaded, and now with the new haswell setup you are not throttling and thus seeing a significant perf boost because you weren't actually getting all the perf you should have on the Ivy setup in the first place.
Wow... how idiotic can people be? I don't know how much more straightforward I can be with the Haswell CPU being a huge win that doesn't match online benchmarks. No I wasn't throttling, that would have been stupid. Get your own Haswell to find out. I don't care if you take my word for my results... But my results = 45 minutes compile of the ENTIRE chromium source tree using vs2010 (the toolchain that works best) on this i7-4700HQ down from 1 hour and 10-15 minutes on the old i7-3610QM CPU. That's around a 30 minute decrease in time needed. Therefore this i7-4700HQ mobile CPU approximately matches the i7-2600 non-k version desktop CPU I also have in terms of computational power at it's normal 3.4GHz clock. The old laptop was a G75VW and the new one is a G750JW, the new model with the Haswell inside it. Take it or leave it.
I have an i7 930 with ASUS P6X58D - Premium mobo and this is too much of a disappointment for me to upgrade. If Haswell had more improvements to the chipset I would probably have bought that by now, but it looks like I'll just wait till Haswell-E.
I upgraded from i7 920 and EVGA X58 Classified and the upgrade to Haswell/Z87 was well worth it. The improvements to the platform alone were worth it (USB 3.0/SATA6G), but beyond that you get much better UEFI BIOS, and much less power consumption. I'd estimate my system is pulling about 100W less between the CPU and the extremely power hungry X58 Classified.
RAID0 with 3xSATA6G HyperX SSDs in RAID0 is just awesome, 1400MB/s seq reads, 1000MB/s seq writes. And I still have SATA6G ports for my Samsung 840 boot SSD and 2 mechanical drives for storage. Pretty sick stuff.
I agree, my sister's 920 on X58 is having troubles, and now I can safely recommend her the quad-core IB-E as a replacement. Sadly memory prices have gone up, so it's no longer safe to say "just get 64GB of RAM", is another advantage over Haswell, besides more PCIe lanes. Also, it's a bit of a bummer, that X79 didn't see an upgrade. More fast SATA and all-USB 3 would have been nice to have, but I suppose it's not interesting for the server market, and while merging the DMI-end of X79 with the controller-end of Z87 might be possible, the market is probably too small.
The most exciting thing of the Ivy Bridge-E launch is that the budget SKU is now unlocked. People looking to get more PCIe lanes, memory overclock and still overclock their CPU but don't need six core can now do it without spending overboard. This would be useful for people looking to game at 4K on 3-4 GPUs and need the PCIe bandwidth. While a 4770K on a PLX-equipped board would do quite well too, if there's a worst case scenario where one might be concerned with lane bandwidth that is 4K.
It's not too exciting -- SNB-E lets you increase BCLK to some preset values. Combine this with decreasing the multipliers and the 3820 is essentially just as overclockable as its bigger brothers.
Pumping the BCLK too high to get a better overclock might be damaging to other components; not to mention you would get a better OC from a 4820K plus a refined architecture at the same price. I agree it's not super exciting and it's not a huge improvement, but it might be worth it for some people. Especially those looking to game at 4K on 3-4 GPUs.
That's what ratios are for. Haven't heard about damaged components from BCLK OCing. I'm running a 181MHz BCLK on my i7 860 for 18 months (157MHz for the time before that, over 2 years IIRC) and haven't damaged anything. And the assumption that the IVB-E overclocks better than the SNB-E is not yet proven. I agree that it is likely (at least a few % better OC), but not a certainty after SNB is still competitive with IVB and HW on the OC front (for different reasons of course).
Haswell-E is unlikely to offer anything more than Ivy-E -- remember Haswell was really focused on much better power mgmt and longer battery life for portable uses--most of the benches I've seen don't put it much higher in IPC (and in a few cases slightly lower) than Ivy.
I can imagine a lot of businesses with lots of racks of Intel cluster hardware seeing a, say, 30% reduction in watt per performance, and viewing that as a huge upgrade. Or am I mistaken in thinking electricity bills and increased hardware reliability due to less heat and noise are big issues for them?
I still don't see a reason to upgrade my i7-980x 32nm gulftown cpu. Just a shame 3.5 years later and there still is not enough speed increase to justify buying a new mobo, new ram, and a new cpu. But it's a double edged sword really cause it's nice that the 1000 dollar cpu has paid itself off by staying relevant for this long. Honestly I don't think haswell-e will even be fast enough to warrant an upgrade. 14nm broadwell-e will most likely be the next worthwhile upgrade meaning I get 6 years of good use out of gulftown. So its good in some ways and bad in some ways. Whenever sata express and ddr4 get released that is when I will most likely upgrade from gulftown because I don't need anymore cpu power but I'd love faster ram and sata express and maybe a couple thunderbolt ports as well.
My friends thought I was stupid spending 1000 on a cpu but it's not like the old days where you needed to upgrade every product cycle. I run comfortably at 4.44ghz on all 6 cores and my performance is still near the top of the charts. Bring on sata express and ddr4 so I can actually upgrade to something.
Yeah I think gulftown buyers made a great choice retrospectively. Will probably be one of the longest lasting CPUs ever. While I have a worse CPU I'm still not excited at all to upgrade to haswell or Ivy-E but then I also don't want to wait forever, eg. haswell-e or skylake. A bit frustrating.
Lots would have said you were foolish back then, investing in 980x, but I had a quiet confidence that it would be an awesome CPU for a long time...
I just didn't realise it would still be completely awesome even today. A healthy overclock and a giant cooler, and it's still doing everything you could possibly want.
I'm the 980X train too and it's a great ride! Even after all those years, I see no reason to upgrade. I have an ASUS Sabertooth which was relatively cheap and comes with a five year warranty so I'm good for another couple years.
The only thing I'm not entirely happy with is power consumption, but I don't think that alone is worth the upgrade. Especially that getting equivalent peak performance out of Haswell (or IVB-E) is expensive.
This is why I didn't bother upgrading to LGA2011 2 years ago with SNB-E, and why I'm glad I didn't wait for IVB-E this time around.
The platform and CPU arch is already dated tech before it even launches. Unless you have specific use patterns that benefit from 6c/12t, you're much better off going with Haswell strictly for the platform updates. 10-12 USB 3.0 ports and 6 SATA3/6G ports is a breath of fresh air given the stagnancy of LGA2011.
Also, PCIe 3.0 support is not guaranteed with LGA2011, at least not with Nvidia cards. It will be interesting if Intel decides to finally validate PCIe 3.0 for the platform with IVB-E, but as it is now, you need a reg hack for Nvidia GPUs and even then, some boards won't work stably at PCIe 3.0 speeds.
The price for Intel to manufacture these is radically lower and not just due to the die shrink: they are native 6 core chips. The high end Sandy Bridge-E chips were native 8 core dies with 2 cores disabled for the consumer market. Now the high end Ivy Bridge-E Xeon chips are going to ship with 12 cores at the top with 10 and 8 core binned parts from that. No consumer chip will use this high end die which is expected to be over 400 mm^2.
There was a native quad core Sandy Bridge-E chip but released to consumers only as the Core i7 3820. This chip came a few months later due validating the different die.
Anyway, the one thing Intel really needs to update isn't necessary their CPU line up for socket 2011 but rather the chipset. X79 is buggy and was seriously cut down at the last minute. Originally it was to ship with eight 6 Gbit SAS ports but only the Xeon version got that (and only at 3 Gbit speeds). Intel could have just fixed the bugs in the original X79 chipset and ship it as part of the Ivy Bridge-E refresh. Though it would be to see an entirely new chipset with native USB 3.0 (X79 still use external controllers), pure SATA 6 Gbit, 10Gbit Ethernet, QPI uplinks and perhaps even Thunderbolt.
I think the chipset is the reason to wait for Haswell-E. Of course will have to see what it actually ships with and how the overall package performs, but there "should" be some interesting and useful improvements.
Actually, 12 core IVB-EP has its own die (HCC). 10 and 8 core parts come from MCC die (MCC = medium core count). HEDT (consumer) IVB-E comes from third die (LCC).
I've decided to go with Haswell (E3 Xeon on C226 chipset). For my purposes, the chipset advantages of Z87/C226 outweigh the core and memory channel advantages of SB-E and IB-E.
The original VR Zone table had two major typos and you guys just copied and pasted them in. The 3960X and 3970X clock speeds are wrong. They should be 3.3 and 3.5 GHz respectively. The new 4960X is actually slightly higher in clock speed. Journalism is really going down hill if stores are just being copied and pasted with no fact checking.
I'm running a 920 on Intels X58 Board and I'm having no issues running all 4 cores with HT @ 3.8. Got a 6950 a little while back (originally had the 4870). I know everyone has different standards (and wallet sizes) but I can't justify upgrading right now. I'm going back to school and this will have to get me through.. and I'm fine with that. This is a solid rig.
I'm waiting to upgrade my SB laptop until 14nm is realized and prices have dropped from launch highs. On desktop I'm not really sure, I may put together a Mini-ITX build with Haswell as my media center or I might end up waiting to do that until 14nm as well. Doesn't matter as much on the desktop but in general it's always best to wait as long as possible with computers. There's always something better next year.
Crunchong BOINC 24/7 on a 3770K 4.10 GHz @ 1.03 V and on the iGPU @ 1.35 GHz ~1.00 V. A 4770/K would be an upgrade I could appreciate but not justify (unless there's a good offer for selling my current system). Not interested on socket 2011 for private use - boards are too expensive and burn too much power.
I'd be interested in a 4770R instead, with "multicore enhancement" and a little BCLK OC it should reach 4.0 - 4.1 at power efficient ~1.00 - 1.05 V. I suspect the eDRAM could help tremendously when running 7 - 8 memory bandwidth hungry threads along my normal stuff. But no end-user solutions are available at all and tests regarding the CPU speedup are scarce (thanks for trying, guys!).
Even more interesting would be a similar solution with Broadwell. Although socketed CPUs with GT3e would be even better and might make me switch without much further doubt.
It's almost like they should give up these chips, if they made all Xeon's unlocked, people could buy a server chipset board with overclocking bios features. While the chipset supports ECC you don't have to use it, it was a bit like the X58 Intel board supported ECC if you put a Xeon in there.
This is one thing that I believe should be standard throughout all desktop and mobile processors: optional ECC support. Reliability features like this are nearly free as the CPU's themselves support it but just disabled in some cases (even Intel's Atom line has ECC support but keep it disabled traditionally). The physical DIMM slots don't change but the motherboard manufacturer has to run a few more traces between the socket and DIMM slots - a few pennies change. BIOS/EFI would need a bit of change but most of that work would be done anyway to account for scenarios where a user would insert an ECC DIMM into a non-ECC board.
I will say that AMD is nice enough to offer ECC on the desktop as well as non-ECC in their server chips. It was nice to use eight 4 GB non-ECC DIMMs in a socket G34 graphics workstation without issue. That same box has since been upgraded to eight 16 GB registered ECC DIMMs.
Haswell-E with 8 cores is the next logical upgrade point for someone who currently has a 3930k. It wild probably be another year+ then before I make another major upgrade.
I'm still on a 775 Core 2 Duo :) With a good GPU and an SSD the CPU matters not a lot. Was tempted by an i7 but held off for this one. If it lasts even half as long as my trusty overclocked Northwood I'd be ecstatic.
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lmcd - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
There seems to be nearly zero reason to upgrade. Max 2-3% boost, I'm betting.duncan-idaho - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
20w decrease in TDP is nothing to sneeze at for the Xeon variant. Intel builds the 2011 chips for Xeon, whatever increases the 4960x gets are a peripheral concern compared to the concerns of datacenter types who care a lot more about heat and power and support cycles than they do about a few megahertz.MrSpadge - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Of course no reason to upgrade, but the gains will be higher.. the switch from SNB to IVB alone makes up for more than your estimate. Then there are ~100 MHz at similar price points and the CPUs should be able to hit higher turbo bins more often (if allowed to) due to the lower power consumption.Samus - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I'm still rocking a 5 year old i7-950 system on an x58 board (which was originally a i7-920 from 2008)Still don't have a compelling reason to upgrade. STILL.
IUU - Monday, August 5, 2013 - link
This is because the whole industry tries to persuade you, that all your needs can be met with less than 10 times the computing power and no storage(cloud nonsense). Don't seek the devil in dark alleys, for it is in the light of day it likes to hide.RU482 - Monday, August 5, 2013 - link
I think it's safe to say you are no longer Intel's target marketAchaios - Thursday, August 29, 2013 - link
I am still rocking a Pentium 4 single core @ 2.8GHz (Northwood) laptop. The motherboard is an Intel 845 chipset one. Lithography is 130nm and the socket is 478PGA. Date of production is third quarter, 2002. There is still absolutely no reason to upgrade as it rocks 2GB memory and it can run every business software in the market. In addition to working on it, I use it to watch movies while working out on the treadmill.Pretty safe to say that if all of their customers were like me, Intel would have gone out of business.
It will probably take another 10 years before it gets obsolete.
YazX_ - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
if you got SB or IB, there is no reason to upgrade to haswell nor IB-E. its all the same recycled thing with better iGPU performance which only 1% of people care about. to be honest this is a good news for us as our CPUs will stick for a while before the next upgrade.Loki726 - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
You could always choose to not upgrade your CPU in the past if you were happy with the perf. At least back then you had the option of shelling out more money for more perf. Now you can't.frumpus - Friday, September 27, 2013 - link
I got an i7-960, should i upgrade to SB-E or haswell?mikk - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
I'm afraid you are a bit off with the price list Jarred.JarredWalton - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
In what sense? Some of the SNB-E parts might now be available for less, but otherwise these are the prices that are leaked. That's not the same as what you or I would pay when they ship, and since it's a leak there's inherently a level of "take this with a grain of salt" at play. VR-Zone might have made up prices, but I doubt that as well. IVB-E is a tough sell for SNB-E owners, and SNB-E and IVB-E are a tough sell for everyone, so having prices drop a bit wouldn't be surprising.If you're talking about the current SNB-E prices vs. the listed, that's just a case of retail online prices being different from Intel's quoted prices (which probably aren't what most companies pay regardless). I've added the Newegg prices to the tablet for the SNB-E parts, though, just to help clarify things.
mikk - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
IVB-E won't be cheaper than SB-E but your news implies otherwise. I'm afraid they are a bit off, also you don't need a source to know that Intel will price them in a relatively similar range to its predecessor. In this case the source is nonsense, not only the prices are wrong also some of the frequency claims are wrong. A news based on such a flawed source doesn't make sense to me.smartypnt4 - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Do you have an alternative source? If so, I'd love to see it. Considering we're only a month out from the launch of these chips, I doubt these numbers are that far off.MrSpadge - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
And I am afraid you are wrong. "Intel will price them in a relatively similar range to its predecessor" - which is exactly what's in the table. There are also modest frequency boosts in Jareds version, which would make a lot of sense. It may not happen like this, but it sure looks plausible!Sarvesh - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
I agree, gone are the days of upgrading PC components every year (thankfully). I'm perfectly happy with my two year old 2600K and will probably keep it around for another 2 years.These days the performance of most ultrabooks is quite acceptable if you leave out heavy stuff like gaming and photo/video editing. The crappy performance and lack of upgradability were the reasons i never bought a laptop for myself but now..... Zenbook Infinity can't come soon enough!
Mondozai - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
I am using an i5 750K which is from 2009.I also use a GTX 560 Ti, bought just before the release of Battlefield 3 in late summer 2011. I also got 8 gigabyte of RAM in 2011, back when it was ridicolously cheap(I got it for 32 dollars in total).
I can still play Crysis 3 on medium, which is a game that doesn't really interest me anyway. It's actually quite amazing how things have stagnated. Good for my wallet but my tech nerd inside of me is wailing and cursing his fate.
I just don't see a reason to upgrade before I hit a wall. I hope that the next gen consoles will give me a reason, but since I mostly play RTS's or MMORPG's that will give me a prolonged life cycle.
I did buy Star Citizen, which should be taxing on most computers but we'll see how well they'll do. Im guessing pretty bad initial optimizations. We get the alpha this fall/winter and beta next year.
Or I could just get a PS4 (I skipped the previous console generation) since games will be optimized for them anyway, even though I like PC a lot.
Either way, my 2011 experience with the GPU or my 4 year old CPU has taught me that if you can time your purchases well, you can get away with using the same stuff for 3 years or so for the GPU or 5 years or so with the CPU. That gives you a lot cheaper upgrade cycle, but it also makes you very wary of upgrading since you don't wanna be that guy that uses a 1 monitor setup, buys a titan and then the 780 GTX shows up just a few months later with almost the same performance but with a significantly reduced price.
Myrandex - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Hah guys I'm still on a Phenom II X6 CPU. I've considered an upgrade, and when the right price rolls around for some a sweet i7 build I might jump. Not looking forward to replacing all of the components, but it will make a different eventually.Jason
Heavensrevenge - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
Haswell performance is understated because of misleading benchmarks of applications that give the wrong impression of things..Two days ago, I bought a new laptop with i7-4700HQ CPU vs the CPU I had previously, the i7-3610QM.
http://cpuboss.com/cpus/Intel-Core-i7-4700HQ-vs-In... is one such comparison But I'll share a few findings that don't match benchmarks.
I code on V8(chromium code) and my compiles before took 1:10-1:15 this new laptop compiles the same code fresh in ~45 minutes... that's WAY better than 5% useless increase vs the misleading benchmarks I see places. Yes it's my use case but my findings show Haswell helps ALOT. and is a nice perf boost for my use case.
ALSO my Samsung 840 Pro speed went up 15% because of the new chipset :)
Ivy-Bridge = http://imgur.com/W9svCDT
Haswell = http://imgur.com/wctqtdQ
Note: I don't keep the code I compile on the SSD, compiling is mainly CPU bound this generation and not really disk bound so the code is all on an HDD.
JarredWalton - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
If you're comparing two different laptops with different chipsets, there's a lot more at play than just the CPU upgrades. I don't even know how CPU Boss tested those two chips, but depending on what you're doing Haswell is either slightly to moderately faster than Ivy Bridge. With a clean install of Win7 on a laptop vs. a typical OEM install on a laptop, or differing HDDs/SSDs, RAM, chipsets, etc. everything is subject to change.Heavensrevenge - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
Actually I just swapped out my Primary boot SSD + OS which is Win 8.1 of about a month old, so all software configs and compilation toolchain+compiler are identical. Mainly the massive difference is moving to the newer generation CPU+chipset but that enough has an astounding performance boost.It's ALL from the Haswell improvements with memory latency etc, it has made a larger impact for me than something like a Win(crap)RAR compression benchmark comparison :P
I'm just saying my personal findings to be far more impressive and different than the benchmarks have noted what Haswell + what Haswell's plug into offer in terms of performance.
JarredWalton - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I'm still not quite getting your comparison. What was the new laptop (and hardware), and what's the old laptop (and hardware)?extide - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
It sounds like your old laptop was probably throttling the CPU when all 4 cores/8 threads were loaded, and now with the new haswell setup you are not throttling and thus seeing a significant perf boost because you weren't actually getting all the perf you should have on the Ivy setup in the first place.Heavensrevenge - Saturday, August 3, 2013 - link
Wow... how idiotic can people be? I don't know how much more straightforward I can be with the Haswell CPU being a huge win that doesn't match online benchmarks. No I wasn't throttling, that would have been stupid.Get your own Haswell to find out. I don't care if you take my word for my results...
But my results = 45 minutes compile of the ENTIRE chromium source tree using vs2010 (the toolchain that works best) on this i7-4700HQ down from 1 hour and 10-15 minutes on the old i7-3610QM CPU.
That's around a 30 minute decrease in time needed.
Therefore this i7-4700HQ mobile CPU approximately matches the i7-2600 non-k version desktop CPU I also have in terms of computational power at it's normal 3.4GHz clock. The old laptop was a G75VW and the new one is a G750JW, the new model with the Haswell inside it.
Take it or leave it.
silenceisgolden - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
I have an i7 930 with ASUS P6X58D - Premium mobo and this is too much of a disappointment for me to upgrade. If Haswell had more improvements to the chipset I would probably have bought that by now, but it looks like I'll just wait till Haswell-E.chizow - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I upgraded from i7 920 and EVGA X58 Classified and the upgrade to Haswell/Z87 was well worth it. The improvements to the platform alone were worth it (USB 3.0/SATA6G), but beyond that you get much better UEFI BIOS, and much less power consumption. I'd estimate my system is pulling about 100W less between the CPU and the extremely power hungry X58 Classified.RAID0 with 3xSATA6G HyperX SSDs in RAID0 is just awesome, 1400MB/s seq reads, 1000MB/s seq writes. And I still have SATA6G ports for my Samsung 840 boot SSD and 2 mechanical drives for storage. Pretty sick stuff.
Rick83 - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I agree, my sister's 920 on X58 is having troubles, and now I can safely recommend her the quad-core IB-E as a replacement.Sadly memory prices have gone up, so it's no longer safe to say "just get 64GB of RAM", is another advantage over Haswell, besides more PCIe lanes. Also, it's a bit of a bummer, that X79 didn't see an upgrade. More fast SATA and all-USB 3 would have been nice to have, but I suppose it's not interesting for the server market, and while merging the DMI-end of X79 with the controller-end of Z87 might be possible, the market is probably too small.
yhselp - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
The most exciting thing of the Ivy Bridge-E launch is that the budget SKU is now unlocked. People looking to get more PCIe lanes, memory overclock and still overclock their CPU but don't need six core can now do it without spending overboard. This would be useful for people looking to game at 4K on 3-4 GPUs and need the PCIe bandwidth. While a 4770K on a PLX-equipped board would do quite well too, if there's a worst case scenario where one might be concerned with lane bandwidth that is 4K.madmilk - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
It's not too exciting -- SNB-E lets you increase BCLK to some preset values. Combine this with decreasing the multipliers and the 3820 is essentially just as overclockable as its bigger brothers.yhselp - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Pumping the BCLK too high to get a better overclock might be damaging to other components; not to mention you would get a better OC from a 4820K plus a refined architecture at the same price. I agree it's not super exciting and it's not a huge improvement, but it might be worth it for some people. Especially those looking to game at 4K on 3-4 GPUs.Death666Angel - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
That's what ratios are for. Haven't heard about damaged components from BCLK OCing. I'm running a 181MHz BCLK on my i7 860 for 18 months (157MHz for the time before that, over 2 years IIRC) and haven't damaged anything.And the assumption that the IVB-E overclocks better than the SNB-E is not yet proven. I agree that it is likely (at least a few % better OC), but not a certainty after SNB is still competitive with IVB and HW on the OC front (for different reasons of course).
androticus - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
Haswell-E is unlikely to offer anything more than Ivy-E -- remember Haswell was really focused on much better power mgmt and longer battery life for portable uses--most of the benches I've seen don't put it much higher in IPC (and in a few cases slightly lower) than Ivy.garadante - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Haswell-E is DDR4 quad channel, I believe.madmilk - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Haswell-E is rumored to have 8 cores, which is a worthwhile upgrade if you need the threads but can't afford some Xeons.Aenean144 - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I can imagine a lot of businesses with lots of racks of Intel cluster hardware seeing a, say, 30% reduction in watt per performance, and viewing that as a huge upgrade. Or am I mistaken in thinking electricity bills and increased hardware reliability due to less heat and noise are big issues for them?Laststop311 - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
I still don't see a reason to upgrade my i7-980x 32nm gulftown cpu. Just a shame 3.5 years later and there still is not enough speed increase to justify buying a new mobo, new ram, and a new cpu. But it's a double edged sword really cause it's nice that the 1000 dollar cpu has paid itself off by staying relevant for this long. Honestly I don't think haswell-e will even be fast enough to warrant an upgrade. 14nm broadwell-e will most likely be the next worthwhile upgrade meaning I get 6 years of good use out of gulftown. So its good in some ways and bad in some ways. Whenever sata express and ddr4 get released that is when I will most likely upgrade from gulftown because I don't need anymore cpu power but I'd love faster ram and sata express and maybe a couple thunderbolt ports as well.My friends thought I was stupid spending 1000 on a cpu but it's not like the old days where you needed to upgrade every product cycle. I run comfortably at 4.44ghz on all 6 cores and my performance is still near the top of the charts. Bring on sata express and ddr4 so I can actually upgrade to something.
beginner99 - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Yeah I think gulftown buyers made a great choice retrospectively. Will probably be one of the longest lasting CPUs ever. While I have a worse CPU I'm still not excited at all to upgrade to haswell or Ivy-E but then I also don't want to wait forever, eg. haswell-e or skylake. A bit frustrating.piroroadkill - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Lots would have said you were foolish back then, investing in 980x, but I had a quiet confidence that it would be an awesome CPU for a long time...I just didn't realise it would still be completely awesome even today. A healthy overclock and a giant cooler, and it's still doing everything you could possibly want.
Zertzydoo - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I'm the 980X train too and it's a great ride! Even after all those years, I see no reason to upgrade. I have an ASUS Sabertooth which was relatively cheap and comes with a five year warranty so I'm good for another couple years.The only thing I'm not entirely happy with is power consumption, but I don't think that alone is worth the upgrade. Especially that getting equivalent peak performance out of Haswell (or IVB-E) is expensive.
chizow - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
This is why I didn't bother upgrading to LGA2011 2 years ago with SNB-E, and why I'm glad I didn't wait for IVB-E this time around.The platform and CPU arch is already dated tech before it even launches. Unless you have specific use patterns that benefit from 6c/12t, you're much better off going with Haswell strictly for the platform updates. 10-12 USB 3.0 ports and 6 SATA3/6G ports is a breath of fresh air given the stagnancy of LGA2011.
Also, PCIe 3.0 support is not guaranteed with LGA2011, at least not with Nvidia cards. It will be interesting if Intel decides to finally validate PCIe 3.0 for the platform with IVB-E, but as it is now, you need a reg hack for Nvidia GPUs and even then, some boards won't work stably at PCIe 3.0 speeds.
Kevin G - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
The price for Intel to manufacture these is radically lower and not just due to the die shrink: they are native 6 core chips. The high end Sandy Bridge-E chips were native 8 core dies with 2 cores disabled for the consumer market. Now the high end Ivy Bridge-E Xeon chips are going to ship with 12 cores at the top with 10 and 8 core binned parts from that. No consumer chip will use this high end die which is expected to be over 400 mm^2.There was a native quad core Sandy Bridge-E chip but released to consumers only as the Core i7 3820. This chip came a few months later due validating the different die.
Anyway, the one thing Intel really needs to update isn't necessary their CPU line up for socket 2011 but rather the chipset. X79 is buggy and was seriously cut down at the last minute. Originally it was to ship with eight 6 Gbit SAS ports but only the Xeon version got that (and only at 3 Gbit speeds). Intel could have just fixed the bugs in the original X79 chipset and ship it as part of the Ivy Bridge-E refresh. Though it would be to see an entirely new chipset with native USB 3.0 (X79 still use external controllers), pure SATA 6 Gbit, 10Gbit Ethernet, QPI uplinks and perhaps even Thunderbolt.
Sabresiberian - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I think the chipset is the reason to wait for Haswell-E. Of course will have to see what it actually ships with and how the overall package performs, but there "should" be some interesting and useful improvements.psyq321 - Sunday, August 4, 2013 - link
Haswell EP platform will bring massive improvements compared to Romley platform (SNB/IVB-EP).However, considering that Intel is not under any pressure to release it quick, I guess it will take more than a year from now.
psyq321 - Sunday, August 4, 2013 - link
Actually, 12 core IVB-EP has its own die (HCC). 10 and 8 core parts come from MCC die (MCC = medium core count). HEDT (consumer) IVB-E comes from third die (LCC).dishayu - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
If there was a LGA2011 equivalent of Z87, i'd jump on the 555$ part.tribbles - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I've decided to go with Haswell (E3 Xeon on C226 chipset). For my purposes, the chipset advantages of Z87/C226 outweigh the core and memory channel advantages of SB-E and IB-E.DaveninCali - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
The original VR Zone table had two major typos and you guys just copied and pasted them in. The 3960X and 3970X clock speeds are wrong. They should be 3.3 and 3.5 GHz respectively. The new 4960X is actually slightly higher in clock speed. Journalism is really going down hill if stores are just being copied and pasted with no fact checking.JarredWalton - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
It had more than two major typos; sorry for missing a few others, but I've fixed them now. Thanks!thurst0n - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I'm running a 920 on Intels X58 Board and I'm having no issues running all 4 cores with HT @ 3.8. Got a 6950 a little while back (originally had the 4870). I know everyone has different standards (and wallet sizes) but I can't justify upgrading right now. I'm going back to school and this will have to get me through.. and I'm fine with that. This is a solid rig.Hrel - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I'm waiting to upgrade my SB laptop until 14nm is realized and prices have dropped from launch highs. On desktop I'm not really sure, I may put together a Mini-ITX build with Haswell as my media center or I might end up waiting to do that until 14nm as well. Doesn't matter as much on the desktop but in general it's always best to wait as long as possible with computers. There's always something better next year.MrSpadge - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
> What's going to be in your next build?Crunchong BOINC 24/7 on a 3770K 4.10 GHz @ 1.03 V and on the iGPU @ 1.35 GHz ~1.00 V. A 4770/K would be an upgrade I could appreciate but not justify (unless there's a good offer for selling my current system). Not interested on socket 2011 for private use - boards are too expensive and burn too much power.
I'd be interested in a 4770R instead, with "multicore enhancement" and a little BCLK OC it should reach 4.0 - 4.1 at power efficient ~1.00 - 1.05 V. I suspect the eDRAM could help tremendously when running 7 - 8 memory bandwidth hungry threads along my normal stuff. But no end-user solutions are available at all and tests regarding the CPU speedup are scarce (thanks for trying, guys!).
Even more interesting would be a similar solution with Broadwell. Although socketed CPUs with GT3e would be even better and might make me switch without much further doubt.
Ytterbium - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
It's almost like they should give up these chips, if they made all Xeon's unlocked, people could buy a server chipset board with overclocking bios features. While the chipset supports ECC you don't have to use it, it was a bit like the X58 Intel board supported ECC if you put a Xeon in there.Could get a E5-2687W 8Cores, 3.4Ghz, 4Ghz turbo.
Kevin G - Friday, August 2, 2013 - link
This is one thing that I believe should be standard throughout all desktop and mobile processors: optional ECC support. Reliability features like this are nearly free as the CPU's themselves support it but just disabled in some cases (even Intel's Atom line has ECC support but keep it disabled traditionally). The physical DIMM slots don't change but the motherboard manufacturer has to run a few more traces between the socket and DIMM slots - a few pennies change. BIOS/EFI would need a bit of change but most of that work would be done anyway to account for scenarios where a user would insert an ECC DIMM into a non-ECC board.I will say that AMD is nice enough to offer ECC on the desktop as well as non-ECC in their server chips. It was nice to use eight 4 GB non-ECC DIMMs in a socket G34 graphics workstation without issue. That same box has since been upgraded to eight 16 GB registered ECC DIMMs.
Ytterbium - Sunday, August 4, 2013 - link
I agree it would nice to have the option.twtech - Saturday, August 3, 2013 - link
Haswell-E with 8 cores is the next logical upgrade point for someone who currently has a 3930k. It wild probably be another year+ then before I make another major upgrade.don_k - Wednesday, August 7, 2013 - link
I'm still on a 775 Core 2 Duo :) With a good GPU and an SSD the CPU matters not a lot. Was tempted by an i7 but held off for this one. If it lasts even half as long as my trusty overclocked Northwood I'd be ecstatic.Etern205 - Wednesday, August 7, 2013 - link
I've learned in Thai, 5 is pronounced as "HA" so Core i7 4930K has a price of $hahaha :P