What's the focus post haswell?

B

BottomsUp

Gawd
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Aug 29, 2010
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I'm still rocking my SB. IVB was a minor increase in IPC and haswell the same except it had major energy efficiency improvements.

What's next? Any big IPC improvements in the horizon or more focus on power efficiency and intel video HD/quicksync etc?

Thx
 
i think the matter will continue with increase the energy efficiency, its also rumored that intel will replace hyperthreading and reintroduce the Canceled Out-of-Order Execution Technology in the older P6 Family (Teijas and Jayhawk), energy and thermal efficiency will allow to use it as those points was the big fails in Teijas and Jayhawk thats why they were canceled.. probably if intel do not have any kind of pressure from AMD the next Jump in IPC improvement will comes with Skylake or Cannonlake..
 
With the limit of silicon looming in the not to distant future, Who knows.

Theoretical limit is something like 10-12nm. Some memory modules were made with 12nm which is impressive.

Rumors abound about using diamond and other odd materials. I think there's only so much they can do with rare earth materials. So being the dead end that it is, it's time for another approach.
 
Power efficiency and iGPU's is all both sides care about lately and that will most likely be the case for every codename we know of for both sides. AMD has basically canceled non-GPU parts and that's all we ever hear and see from Intel, so it's a pretty fair assumption that this is the direction we're going in.

IPC and throwing more Cores w/HT for shits and giggles is about the only trick they have. I'm trying to remember who said this from Intel recently, but someone from the company (past) basically said the 1000x improvement we've seen in the past 40 years will maybe be about 20-40x improvement from today in the same 40 years. Mainly through tweaking the IPC. In other words we're talking 1/20th the change of what those old timers would have seen since the 70's.

There are going to have to be some BIG and possibly unforeseen changes in the next 10 years if we're not only going to keep this pace, but try to match the past 40 years in CPU architecture.

*EDIT* Found the article.

http://www.extremetech.com/computin...itect-moores-law-will-be-dead-within-a-decade
 
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Software needs to go multicore. Then we can worry less about IPC and get excited about more cores.
 
How much software can really benefit from multiple cores though? And even with software that does, how many threads can you possibly use before you don't have a need for any more?

Lots of server software and encoding software can benefit from multiple cores, but Joe Average or even Joe Gamer is going to benefit a lot more from better IPC than more cores past 4-8 cores and I'm not sure if that's ever going to change.
 
GhostCow said:
How much software can really benefit from multiple cores though? And even with software that does, how many threads can you possibly use before you don't have a need for any more?

Lots of server software and encoding software can benefit from multiple cores, but Joe Average or even Joe Gamer is going to benefit a lot more from better IPC than more cores past 4-8 cores and I'm not sure if that's ever going to change.
Click to expand...

As a software engineer, I'd contend that most software can benefit from multi-core.

The reality is that it's actually quite difficult to write robust thread-safe code.
 
Here's a question, since we're discussing development down the road. I'm currently setting up to pick up a new motherboard and CPU to kick my current setup up a few notches, but I'm starting to get a bit of pause.

I was originally intended to pick up an i7-4770K and a decent motherboard with a modest feature set for (ASUS Z87-A, et al) for modest overclocking for gaming and some hobby-level digital art. I'm just wondering if Intel is liable to stick with LGA1150 compatibility for the next chip, though. If they are, I might be tempted to just get the i5-4670K and then just fork out for a better motherboard, and sit on the sidelines until the new batch of processors come out.

Since I'm coming in from the AMD fold of things (and I'm already way out of date with AMD CPUs, these days), I don't quite know how long Intel sticks with a particular socket set until they change it. I get the feeling they change it nearly every year, but I still just have to ask.
 
I don't quite know how long Intel sticks with a particular socket set until they change it. I get the feeling they change it nearly every year, but I still just have to ask.
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It used to be every 2 years for Intel although now I see it being every year since Haswell refresh will be a new socket and then next year DDR4 will be a new socket for both Intel and AMD. Although AMD may wait till 2016 to use DDR4.
 
drescherjm said:
It used to be every 2 years for Intel although now I see it being every year since Haswell refresh will be a new socket and then next year DDR4 will be a new socket for both Intel and AMD. Although AMD may wait till 2016 to use DDR4.
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Ugh, that's what I was afraid of. :(
 
BTW, My comment was did not include the enthusiast platform. Which tends to stay around a little longer.
 
I'm still running a i7-970 Gulftown overclocked to 4.8ghz on air with a Venomous-X. I've had it for over three years now and no processor has excited me enough to make a new build (and I used to build a new machine every 9-12 months the past 10 years or so).

At this point I'm really starting to be irritated by the limitations of x58. Everything from the BIOS to the 3GB SATA limitation (my main machine always streamlines 2x 6GB/s 512GB SSD's in Raid0). I had the foresight to always stick with the medium to high-end eVGA motherboards, so I was able to retire my 580GTX SLI and upgrade to a pair of 290X's recently and use Crossfire on the nVidia board (thanks eVGA for including both chipsets!), but I'd really like to make the leap to a newer processor soon. =/
 
3GB SATA limitation
Click to expand...

Since over 90% of applications do not read or write in large enough chunks for SATA II to be a bottleneck this should not cause you much performance loss to worry about that.
 
Personally, I hope they continue with the power/heat focus. I've got 5 machines right now sucking down the same amount of wall-juice as my gaming rig I retired in '05 did by itself. CPUs are "fast enough" for most applications right now.
 
TeeJayHoward said:
Personally, I hope they continue with the power/heat focus. I've got 5 machines right now sucking down the same amount of wall-juice as my gaming rig I retired in '05 did by itself. CPUs are "fast enough" for most applications right now.
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Problem is they aren't going that way with CPU's intended for "gaming rigs". The power and heat has gone down slightly, but the addition of dual and quad cores has diminished a lot of returns. Overclocking is also out of the question as the power/heat isn't linear. Now they're moving the iGPU onto ALL CPU's regardless if you want it. Further going to add to the power/heat envelope. Lets not forget about the Voltage Regulator disaster. I don't know what your other 5 rigs are doing, but I have a hard time believing 5 middle-end machines are using the same power as a high-end one in 2005.

Also a lot of other components are helping out with the power usage. LCD's have gone down drastically, SSD's, and most importantly, video cards. In a way video cards have caused power to spike and depending on what kind of system you usually run that figure has actually gone down.
 
Some news about the new haswell refresh. http://wccftech.com/intel-devil-s-canyon-launching-june-2014/
I just googled it and randomly picked this article because it is very new. Looks like I'll be upgrading from my trusty dusty Wolfdale finally to a Devils Canyon... Woop woop. Oh yeah.. But too bad money will be a lil tight for me because of school and having to dump over a thousand dollars into my truck recently. I had to replace the windshield, water pump, radiator and hoses, thermostat, timing belt, front shocks, and on top of that I need to get the safety/emission inspection done this month. (face palm).
 
FragMem said:
Here's a question, since we're discussing development down the road. I'm currently setting up to pick up a new motherboard and CPU to kick my current setup up a few notches, but I'm starting to get a bit of pause.

I was originally intended to pick up an i7-4770K and a decent motherboard with a modest feature set for (ASUS Z87-A, et al) for modest overclocking for gaming and some hobby-level digital art. I'm just wondering if Intel is liable to stick with LGA1150 compatibility for the next chip, though. If they are, I might be tempted to just get the i5-4670K and then just fork out for a better motherboard, and sit on the sidelines until the new batch of processors come out.

Since I'm coming in from the AMD fold of things (and I'm already way out of date with AMD CPUs, these days), I don't quite know how long Intel sticks with a particular socket set until they change it. I get the feeling they change it nearly every year, but I still just have to ask.
Click to expand...

New Haswell refresh uses LGA 1150, but requires the x9x chipsets, and supposedly won't be compatible with the x8x chipsets.

drescherjm said:
It used to be every 2 years for Intel although now I see it being every year since Haswell refresh will be a new socket and then next year DDR4 will be a new socket for both Intel and AMD. Although AMD may wait till 2016 to use DDR4.
Click to expand...

No new socket for Intel, just new chipset required. And Broadwell is supposed to be x9x compatible.

Broadwell will be DDR3, with Skylake being the first Intel mainstream platform to use DDR4.

izusaga said:
I'm still running a i7-970 Gulftown overclocked to 4.8ghz on air with a Venomous-X. I've had it for over three years now and no processor has excited me enough to make a new build (and I used to build a new machine every 9-12 months the past 10 years or so).

At this point I'm really starting to be irritated by the limitations of x58. Everything from the BIOS to the 3GB SATA limitation (my main machine always streamlines 2x 6GB/s 512GB SSD's in Raid0). I had the foresight to always stick with the medium to high-end eVGA motherboards, so I was able to retire my 580GTX SLI and upgrade to a pair of 290X's recently and use Crossfire on the nVidia board (thanks eVGA for including both chipsets!), but I'd really like to make the leap to a newer processor soon. =/
Click to expand...

:confused:

It was a matter of certification (mostly software) that enabled SLI. Virtually all boards that supported two GPUs were Crossfire compatible. nVidia restricted SLI to boards that had at minimum two 8x PCI-E connections, and the chipset had to be SLI certified (AMD's 8xx and 7xx chipsets were not certified because they competed with nVidia's 980a and 7xxa chipsets). Even if the chipsets were not certified, there were hacks that tricked nVidia's software into thinking the chipset was a certified chipset. EVGA did not use two chipsets, x58 was SLI and Crossfire capable. Buying any x58 board from any manufacturer would not have given you anything special over the EVGA board you bought.

OS and application responsiveness is based on low queue depth random reads and writes, and RAID 0 does quite literally nothing to improve those numbers on SSDs. Also, low queue depth random reads and writes have yet to exceed SATA II speeds.
 
Tsumi said:
New Haswell refresh uses LGA 1150, but requires the x9x chipsets, and supposedly won't be compatible with the x8x chipsets.
Click to expand...

ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI & EVGA all have announced that the Haswell refresh chips will be made compatible with most Series 8 boards by using a BIOS update (ASUS and EVGA updates are already available)..

http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/evga_z87_motherboards_compatible_with_haswell_refresh_cpus.html
http://www.hardwareluxx.com/index.php/news/hardware/motherboards/30053-asus-preparing-mainboards-for-haswell-refreshed-cpus-.html
http://www.hardwareluxx.com/index.php/news/hardware/mainboards/30014-gigabyte-preparing-mainboards-for-haswell-refresh-.html
 
AFD said:
ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI & EVGA all have announced that the Haswell refresh chips will be made compatible with most Series 8 boards by using a BIOS update (ASUS and EVGA updates are already available)..

http://www.guru3d.com/news_story/evga_z87_motherboards_compatible_with_haswell_refresh_cpus.html
http://www.hardwareluxx.com/index.php/news/hardware/motherboards/30053-asus-preparing-mainboards-for-haswell-refreshed-cpus-.html
http://www.hardwareluxx.com/index.php/news/hardware/mainboards/30014-gigabyte-preparing-mainboards-for-haswell-refresh-.html
Click to expand...

Well that's good news. Hope it's the same story with Broadwell as well (no pun intended).
 
Araxie said:
i think the matter will continue with increase the energy efficiency, its also rumored that intel will replace hyperthreading and reintroduce the Canceled Out-of-Order Execution Technology in the older P6 Family (Teijas and Jayhawk), energy and thermal efficiency will allow to use it as those points was the big fails in Teijas and Jayhawk thats why they were canceled.. probably if intel do not have any kind of pressure from AMD the next Jump in IPC improvement will comes with Skylake or Cannonlake..
Click to expand...

Tejas and Jayhawk were based on the Netburst architecture, not P6, and Intel never cancelled Out-of-Order execution. It's been in nearly every processor since the Pentium Pro, with the exception being Atom processors. P6 and Netburst did use different techniques for OOE though, and although Intel went back to the P6 style of OOE for Core, Core 2, and Nehalem, they readopted some of the Netburst techniques for Sandy Bridge and later.
 
Wendig0 said:
Some news about the new haswell refresh. http://wccftech.com/intel-devil-s-canyon-launching-june-2014/
I just googled it and randomly picked this article because it is very new. Looks like I'll be upgrading from my trusty dusty Wolfdale finally to a Devils Canyon... Woop woop. Oh yeah.. But too bad money will be a lil tight for me because of school and having to dump over a thousand dollars into my truck recently. I had to replace the windshield, water pump, radiator and hoses, thermostat, timing belt, front shocks, and on top of that I need to get the safety/emission inspection done this month. (face palm).
Click to expand...

Thanks for the info. This is great to know. How does everyone feel about current Haswell and Z87 vs Refresh/ Devil's Canyon and Z97?

A friend of mine is about to order parts to rebuild her PC - she's currently without a functional system at all. Under normal circumstances, I'd tell her to wait for the May 11th Z97 boards, but she has been awarded something of a bonus at her workplace where they will pay for $500 of stuff, but they have to order it for her, and she needs to decide what she wants them to order by the end of this month, April or she loses the cash.

A few months ago, before hearing about the Haswell refresh/DC release dates, we were going to have them order a 4770k and an Asus ROG Maximus VI Hero or Sabertooth Z87 for her (if it went over $500, its okay. She'd just have to pay for the remainder). However, since its so close, it seems problematic to buy this older generation stuff... Still, I have to wonder.

Do you know if there will be any way to pre-order the new motherboard and processor by the end of this month? At current, it doesn't seem visible on Amazon, Newegg etc... but if there was at least a page on the site for the Asus ROG Maximus VII etc... her company could record what to order. Otherwise, if this doesn't happen, we'll have to figure something else out. She does have an old FX-6100 and Asus 990X motherboard that she hasn't used, so I suppose she could build the "rest" of the new system and wait for the new Z97 and Devil's Canyon. It would be much easier to wait if both Z97 and ALL the processors were released on May 11th. Damn Intel again, waiting to release the "good stuff" as they always do.

So what do you think is worth it?
A) Buy 4770K and Z87 presently, as the difference between the new stuff won't be so great as to warrant otherwise or
B) Use the FX-6100 and 990X for the time being, use the $500 for other parts of the build instead, and then buy Z97 and a 4770k on May 11th or..
C) Same as B, except hold out until June 2nd and buy a Z97 along with a Devil's Canyon 4790K.

For what it is worth, this will likely be a relatively long-term system build so as much performance as possible is worth it. She needs powerful hardware for avid gaming as well as video manipulation, and though I'll talk her through a moderate overclock, it isn't like she's going to be trying to squeeze every possible drop of performance out of the thing - cooling will likely be AIO water.

As I'm still on my i7-920 and waiting for Haswell-E / X99, I don't have hands on experience with the last few generations, so your advice helps. Thanks!
 
I chose option
D) Overclock the hell out of i7-920. Wait 6 months until there is Microcenter deal on Z97+4690k.
 
Wendig0 said:
Some news about the new haswell refresh. http://wccftech.com/intel-devil-s-canyon-launching-june-2014/
I just googled it and randomly picked this article because it is very new. Looks like I'll be upgrading from my trusty dusty Wolfdale finally to a Devils Canyon... Woop woop. Oh yeah.. But too bad money will be a lil tight for me because of school and having to dump over a thousand dollars into my truck recently. I had to replace the windshield, water pump, radiator and hoses, thermostat, timing belt, front shocks, and on top of that I need to get the safety/emission inspection done this month. (face palm).
Click to expand...

The TIM situation is funny.

Basically I think with sandy bridge intel realised the product was too good.

So I think they deliberatly hindered overclocking via the tIM on the next 2 chips, and then fix it after that and make it a "selling point". :)

I am still happy with my haswell, very very good chip, came from first gen i5, and I wouldnt be able to afford haswell-e anyway.
 
Tsumi said:
I would say, Option A.
Click to expand...

Ahh, that's good to know. As much as I can tell about the the new refreshes, there are some rather minimal changes compared to Haswell itself, for someone who's not going to run a very specific kind of SSD and/or overclock to the extreme on custom water or better. Hope this is the right decision

ashmelev75 said:
I chose option
D) Overclock the hell out of i7-920. Wait 6 months until there is Microcenter deal on Z97+4690k.
Click to expand...

I personally am doing something similar, and have been for a long time with my ol' 920 and Rampage II Extreme combo. I'm just waiting for Haswell-E (which I REALLY hope will come with proper, new style TIM not Ivy/Haswell style craptacular limitations) and X99 instead... but the purchases made today won't be for me, they're for a friend of mine.

Thanks so far everyone.
 
I'd go option A) too... have a tough time pony'ing up for what seems like a stopgap till Broadwell.
 
Actually... I would change that, depending on how you answer the following question. What other parts of the system does she need?
 
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