PC Hardware → Re: Haswell vs Ivy Bridge Benchmarked Compared Clock-for-Clock

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*..

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.

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/rev ··· 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.

They want to use less power (cooler) with no drop-off in performance.

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.

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.