Technical > PC Hardware Discussion/Reviews > Haswell vs Ivy Bridge Benchmarked Compared Clock-for-Clock

Haswell vs Ivy Bridge Benchmarked Compared Clock-for-Clock

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Russian tech publication OCLab.ru, which claims access to Intel's next-generation Core "Haswell" processor engineering-sample (and an LGA1150 8-series motherboard!), wasted no time in running a quick clock-for-clock performance comparison with the current Core "Ivy Bridge" processor. In its comparison, it set both chips to run at a fixed 2.80 GHz clock speed (by disabling Turbo Boost, C1E, and EIST), indicating that the ES OCLab is in possession of doesn't go beyond that frequency.

The two chips were put through SuperPi 1M, PiFast, and wPrime 32M. The Core "Haswell" chip is only marginally faster than Ivy Bridge, in fact slower in one test. In its next battery of tests, the reviewer stepped up iterations (load), putting the chips through single-threaded SuperPi 32M, and multi-threaded wPrime 1024M. While wPrime performance is nearly identical between the two chips, Haswell crunched SuperPi 32M about 3 percent quicker than Ivy Bridge. It's still to early to take a call on CPU performance percentage difference between the two architectures. Intel's Core "Haswell" processors launch in the first week of June.

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Wow, if a 3% improvement is their "tock" then I'll wait for their next "tick".

I suppose that there isn't really much incentive for them to take a huge leap forward in processing speed. There are so few apps (and users) that can take advantage of the current speeds that an uber-CPU just isn't as important as it once was. Heck, just take a look at some of the antiques still in use in this thread: »Oldest running MAIN PC?

(Typed on my C2D 2.2 GHz antique)

reply to Octavean
While I know nothing about the CPU performance, I think there are many other compelling attributes of Haswell over Ivy Bridge for several segments of the user base. Power consumption on certain SKUs is likely to be much better - making for thinner/lighter Ultrabooks. I'm pretty sure graphics performance will be increased as well - for those who care (most folks here put in add-in cards anyhow)

Haswell is not my program, so I can't speak definitively either way
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"We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.... We are far too easily pleased." C.S. Lewis

reply to HarryH3
I think intel may be giving amd a chance to catch up, so they dont become a monopoly which could cause the government to break them up. Kinda like how the p4 and PD werent as good as amd so they got a bit more cash, then the c2d/c2q came out and BOOM.

Is what I would say were I a conspiracy theorist.

In reality they are trying to catch up to amd's apus. The integrated haswell gpu went toe to toe with a 650m supposedly(»Haswell iGPU will equal GT 650M performance). Truth be told I would be surprised if amd's next gen apu wasnt better than that since they are already so far a head of intel.

Putting their emphasis on the gpu makes the cpu lack behind.

reply to Octavean
So let's pretend for a moment the performance between the two models is more or less the same (just assume give or take 3-5%). That's not a big improvement, agreed -- but I rarely upgrade my CPUs these days purely based on getting a performance boost.

So what does Haswell offer that Ivy Bridge doesn't? Lower TDP? Lower average power usage (not the same as TDP)? More on-die features? I haven't researched the model.

My point is this: if Haswell is "marginally faster" (~3%), yet its power draw is, say, 25% less, then that's a still an improvement, just not in the performance category. This sort of thing would matter especially to folks who run in low airflow environments or hae mass numbers of these processors (25% power savings is pretty dramatic when you have, say, a hundred boxes).
--
Making life hard for others since 1977.
I speak for myself and not my employer/affiliates of my employer.

reply to Octavean
I wouldn't put too much stock in an early engineering sample. That said, I want to believe it's a significant improvement, so perhaps I should just buy an i5-3570k and be done with it.
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Those who would give up Essential Liberty to purchase a little Temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety.

I thought that Sandy Bridge was the "tick" and Ivy Bridge was the "tock".

Haswell appears to be the "flop"

reply to trparky
Tock is the new process with older architecture - Sandy Bridge.
Tick is the new architecture with proven process - Ivy Bridge.

Haswell is the Tock - sticking with the 22nm process, new micro-architecture.

--
"We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.... We are far too easily pleased." C.S. Lewis

reply to Octavean
Hickory dickery dock.

reply to Octavean
I think they are missing the point here. The current processor performance metric shouldn't be superpi anymore as the modern processor contains 1 or more arithmetic as well as 1 or more graphics processing cores. I think the major focus for this tock is on the GPU which they failed to take measure of. If my guess is correct, there should be a 150%-200% increase in performance for the on-die GPU.

BTW, a tick is suppose to be a new processing node while a tock is new architecture

Most of us here have getter gpus anyway, and amd may even have better gpus. Intel is ignoring the one thing they did best.

What, like sell a bazzilion processors and hold 80%+ of the tradition client market?

What the big chip companies did "best" last year is no longer good enough. Low power is the name of the game - performance per watt. That is where the effort is going these days Go read the analysts reports. According to them, the "pc" is dead - mobile computing is where it is at. Can't put a Core i7 in a tablet.... (yet). Of course, still can't make the top end *slower*..
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"We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.... We are far too easily pleased." C.S. Lewis

To buggery with the 'analysts', they know crap. The desktop is not dead, nor will any of the computing markets ever die.

I'm all for getting lower power consumption and more PPW, but that is no excuse to not progress technology power. Just because the isheep dont use a desktop doesn't mean those parts cant be used to progress out world.

We don't need innovation to save power. The slower existing processors do that just fine.

reply to ccallana
That's fine for consumer stuff but people like me doing CAD and stuff still want all the performance they can get. I'm not going to have as much motivation to drop huge money on new compute servers and workstations if the performance gains aren't significant. The machines we are buying now pack two Xeon E5-2690's that run about $2k each, that's $4k straight to Intel of the ~8k price!

More performance per watt is obviously good, it means more cores per chip with the same power consumption.

Unfortunately however not every computation is threaded to take advantage of many cores. We see this in the gaming scene where a dual core i3 can beat an 8-core AMD CPU because it's single-thread performance is superior. »www.tomshardware.com/reviews/far···9-7.html And let's not forget that in the consumer market, gamers are the ones dropping the big cash for high-end CPUs on relatively short upgrade cycles.

I think much of this could be addressed in software. Not sure about the games but I know for a fact that calculations that could be threaded in the software I use are not. For example I want to analyze a circuit at 1000 different frequencies, and I bang my head on the desk as I watch 1 core of my 16-core process each frequency in order. That is a blatant example that could be fixed pretty easily, but there are other problems that are much harder to break up.

(One piece of good news on the gaming front is that both next-gen Xbox and Playstation are rumoured to be packing 8-core AMD CPUs. This may give game developers the kick they need to develop increasingly multi-threaded games, and x86/64 compatible to boot.)

In summary performance, and thread performance, are still important to many consumers and businesses, not to mention the consumers and businesses which are buying the highest quantities of Intel's most expensive processors.

reply to Morris0

reply to Morris0
Actually, it's more important then you think. Less power usage and less heat allows for more shrinkage and circuits onto ever smaller areas of silicon. In effect, less power usage and lower heat production allows for more powerful CPU's in a smaller form factor.

The Haswell has several revolutionary aspects to it. The new form of "3D" (ug) Transistors, for example.

Clearly, however Haswell IS aimed at the "whole system on a chip" applications such as tablets, Ultrabooks, etc etc.
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"Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power." -- Benito Mussolini

reply to me1212
I agree they know crap - but the reason Intel stock is still at $21 is because of what *they* say.

Intel is king of the existing market, is making huge strides in the low power space and has a killer lineup of products over the next few years - but all the analyst folks can say is "the pc is dead, so Intel must be dead too"

Intel will still serve the top end of the market, that is not going away. Anyone who actually thinks that hasn't followed things very long.
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"We are half-hearted creatures, fooling about with drink and sex and ambition when infinite joy is offered us.... We are far too easily pleased." C.S. Lewis