Intel Core "Haswell" Refresh CPUs Launch Date Revealed

In Europe, where electricity is expensive, especially places like Switzerland, where the unit cost appears OK, but it is then loaded with taxes, taxes, and more taxes, (sales taxes, eco taxes, local taxes, and then the municipality pays for street lighting via taxing your consumption, so tax on tax on tax) the effective cost is approximately 3x the KWh cost compared to US/Canada. Efficiency is important. On my dual xeon E5472 rig, I pulled one of the xeons to save heat/electricity/cost. These older xeons just dont downclock or go into efficiency modes like the new CPUs do. Yes, I have lost out on total crunch, but I only need that 2% of the time. 98% of the time my electricity consumption for the rig is now 35% lower. It would be 50% lower if it wasnt for those silly FBDIMMS drinking like there is no tomorrow...

 

Not really imo. I'm still waiting for Skylake...

 

I agree to not understanding fully limitations of CPUs but I do understand that Intel's business choices at each nm process have been to favor power efficiency over speed every single time the last few generations.

It's a shame, they have brought about a decrease in innovation with less competition. I have never met many enthusiasts that want power efficiency in place of speed for i7 systems. i3/i5 users crave or may want lower wattage but anyone buying an i7 really wanting low watt is buying a wrong product.

Intel is realizing their mistakes and other competitors [ARM] have stepped into portables/mobiles and may soon get into x86 with a partnership with AMD.

Intel mobile is a complete waste of time, effort, and money. What does Intel have to show for it except a failed product category [netbooks] and only select white box tablets that carry intel chips in place of mediatek, nvidia and arm chips? Laptops have benefitted some but are being slowly phased out with other competitive offerings.

 

Intel makes most of their money off businesses. Businesses want powerful servers which generally benefit from more cores and workstations and laptops that sip power. In a business you get what you need. For example, I have a MacBook Air for work and it will last me the entire day on a full battery with 30% to spare at the end of the day. I don't need my laptop to be a beast because that's what our development server is for.

Also the general consumer doesn't care about over clocking, they just want it to work and not break the bank, and to some extent that is what businesses want too.

The "enthusiast" population is generally pretty small in comparison, so despite your "complaints" about what Intel has to offer, the rest of their sources of income are perfectly happy with the way that CPUs have been going... and I'm perfectly happy with my MBA for work.

Also, I find that people who consider themselves "enthusiasts" build machines that are more powerful than what they really need and put desire over cost effectiveness. I'm not going to presume why that happens as I'm a developer and not a psychologist, but I can tell you that what you're complaining about, most people Intel caters to don't feel the same or probably won't even care for that matter, which would be more of a testament to the job Intel has been doing.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that what you want is what the world wants. It doesn't quite work that way.

 

I'm sorry, but where has this discussion gone.

Intel is focusing on lower power consumption, less heat, and a more integrated package for a good reason. Intel "mobile" isn't a wasted effort. It isn't really even a wasted effort on their enthusiast offerings.

The idea that Intel has a distinction between mobile offerings and desktop hardware is foolish. The laptop, nettop, and tablet are all technically mobile devices. Each of these devices is also simply a shrink of its desktop and networking counterpart. The server chip is scaled back into the Enthusiast chip, the enthusiast chip is scaled back into the mainstream offering, and the mainstream offering is scaled back into the mobile devices. If you want to complain about this production strategy then you can go pay $800 for your next i7 4770k. Scaling back designs saves money, and achieving goals on your least expensive platform means by the time you hit the enthusiast levels those moderate goals can be far more substantial.

Intel is focusing on heat because it is now a substantial problem. Previous generations could dissipate larger amounts of heat, because they had less heat generating components in a larger area. As dies shrink it becomes impossible to have the same thermal output with the exact same processing potential. For this, Intel has increased thermal efficiency. That 6 core socket 2011 processor is only possible because Intel decreased thermal outputs from their process. I'd hazard that if thermal efficiency wasn't pushed that 6 core processor would have half the transistors that it does, and run near destructive temperatures at less than 3.0 GHz.


I may agree that Intel is being a bit duplicitous in their dealings with enthusiasts, but we aren't a real market. For every water cooled beast dozens of tablets, a multitude of laptops, and a gaggle of work stations are sold. Yes, we pay more for the "privilege" of overclocking, but not ten times more. We seek to push boundaries, and often time spend money on things we don't strictly need (hello Titan). At the same time, if overclockers didn't exist it'd be a hard sell to make new GPUs and CPUs. Realistically, there are core2quads out there merrily chugging along in the business world. Without overclockers, and early adopters, the price of new hardware would kill the markets.

I believe Intel is trying to make nice with performance enthusiasts, because their last really awesome leap was SB. If you made that change, then everything since then has been a nearly impossible sell. Increasing performance by 15%, with an up-front cost of several hundred dollars, just doesn't make a lot of business sense. Intel is trying to court back enthusiasts, because the mainstream is becoming a more difficult market. ARM is cheap, and competes well with Intel in the low cost mobile market. Laptop sales have flagged, because tablets offer enough performance to partially replace them. Desktop markets have flagged, because upgrading is an expensive action which doesn't have a lot of benefits with what is currently on the market. The only real market left is the enthusiast, who are willing to pay extra money for minimal improvements in performance. I can hear them saying that they are courting enthusiasts, I know the track record speaks to the opposite, and I know the lack of competition is making Intel seriously consider how much performance is actually required for an enthusiast platform. I'd say that I'm jaded enough to not believe their promises, but hopeful enough to want the words to be supported by some action. Removing that cheap thermal interface material on their mainstream processors is a good start at least....

 

How many businesses and servers are going to be buying/upgrading to these Haswell refreshes from the previous series? For all of maybe 1-5%?

My complaints are valid just as are your complaints. Your reasoning that most enthusiasts wanting power efficiency is flawless.

My comments are referencing the enthusiast and overclocking user communities and their wants from Intel. Many feel this way and are the minority to the vast mainstream majority.

You may be happy with Intel's progress, I'm not. Like it or not we're all stuck with Intel. I will be glad for the day they get real competition to put them on their ass.

 

You seem to not understand. The physics here is simple. Semi-conductors break down when you bake them, and they can't switch properly as more heat is built up. This is why Intel focuses on heat.

Let's, for just a moment, think about a car instead of a chip. In the 60's and 70's the big push was to increase the cubic volume of the combustion chamber. More volume meant more boom, and more boom drove the cars faster. Your enthusiast car was fast, with a large volume engine.

Now, assuming this trend continued our engines on super cars would have cylinders as big as the old cars. Suck in a gallon of atomized fuel, combust, and you'll get to go 200 miles per hour, for the 2 minutes your fuel tank could provide the gasoline.

Do you see super cars with 1000 CC capacities today? No. You see cars that developed new technologies. A turbo or super charger increase the air quantity in a cylinder, creating a more efficient combustion. Fuel ratios are managed dynamically for the most efficient combustion at a given temperature. Engines are designed with better cooling systems to increase the change in combustion temperature and ambient temperature, to increase expansion volume of the combustion. All of these things don't do a lot to speed up a car, but their combined effect is to have a vehicle that actually uses less fuel and goes faster than old cars.


Intel did the same thing. They gave up on increasing frequency, and focused on thermal performance. A decrease in temperature output of a few degrees per transistor means more can be packed together. Increasing core count allows threaded loads to run faster. Integration of a GPU allows certain encoding to run faster. Honestly, I'd take a 3770 above almost any Core2Quad. The core2 might overclock, but that 3770 (yes, not a k) will spank it every which way. Assuming you go for the 3770k, you get to overclock. Not everyone's bag, but it allows enthusiasts to say that they managed to push their processor faster than those plebs running at stock clocks.

You might lament the fact that Intel is pushing for power efficiency, but make sure you aren't shooting yourself in the foot. Those enthusiast 6 core processors only exist because someone at Intel decreased thermal outputs. They could make a chip 4x the size of current ones, but I'm sure that nobody would pay the $4000+ for a single Enthusiast processor. If you think I'm wrong, then go out and buy for 4960x systems. I'll gladly take one off your hands for free, because two of them have enough raw processing power to stomp anything out there. Donate the third to charity, and consider yourself satisfied with being able to afford more computing power than 99.99% of the population will need in the next decade.

There are very real contentions to be made with Intel's output. The inclusion of a lackluster graphics core in their high end mainstream CPU is only viable if you're an encoder. The movement of VRM onto the CPU means that much more heat is near your system's most heat sensitive component. Thermal paste between the processor and chip lid meant poor performance, even when not overclocking. All of this is a viable argument, but Intel working to reduce thermal output is not. You'll never see a 10+ core consumer CPU if they don't make sure that the processor won't incinerate itself during operation. Your enthusiast chips need that thermal envelope to allow overclocking.

 

Huh? Don't blame the CPU if you turned EIST off. The CPU can downclock just fine when idling.

 

On certain motherboards it was/is impossible to run OCed CPU with any/all energy efficiency options turned on. Take my Asus rampage 3 Formula. It works perfectly in power saving mode on stock speed (i7 920), but change frequency by 1 MHz and it won't boot next time (tested couple of those - it is very normal behavior for this board). I had to switch to some other board (and in 2013 choice was not big) from my old and trusty EVGA SLI3 - most of ports burned out after many years. I had no issues running it with CPU OCed with every possible power saving feature enabled. On Asus it is a no go [world famous firmware].

I don't get it why people run rigs which suck power like there is no tomorrow just idling. Power YES please!... but only when it is required. Not just power for the sake of power. Of course people from countries with dirt cheap electricity have it easy...

Haswell refresh in general is pointless, even for 920 owners. X58 is one of best architectures around, with plenty of fuel in the tank. I don't know even if I will bother with X99 Haswell-E. From what I read nothing spectacular. Certainly it won't be as profound change as upgrade from Pentium 4 to Core 2 [switching VW Golf for Mercedes SLS] and later jump to i7 920/X58 [changing from SLS to Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird].

 

Not many. It's all the companies that have older hardware that are considering overhauling their mobile fleet, their workstations, or servers. Any company with older hardware might consider upgrades for the company.

You may feel that way, and the "minority" might feel that way, but you still don't need more power and weather or not you're willing to accept it, Intel is forcing you to swallow that pill and in the end, it call comes down to Intel trying to improve their bottom line, which is mainly with businesses.

I would also be very careful before speaking for the community. I'm sure that I can find a number of people who are plenty happy with their Intel invests and the improvements over their last platform.

 

yes it is. unless you are doing synthetic benchmarking their is no reason to move from a 920 or any gen 1 I7 atm. I moved from my W3520 to my 4770k and their is 0 improvement on anything I do on a daily basis. The 2 actual every day differences I see are 1 I have a warranty not and my electric bill is lower. Dont try and persuade these people with unrealistic information. Everyone knows sandy ivy and haswell architecture is better then nehalem. Is it better for anything outside of synthetic benchmarks? no.