Early Haswell Review - Anandtech

For me, waiting for IB instead of just getting SB was a mistake. Waiting again for Haswell compensates for that mistake, since the IPC improvements now make up for the lower overclocking headroom. Barely.
 
My current laptop is a dual-core T6400 2.0ghz. I've budgeted for a new i7 Haswell laptop. I'm really hoping I see some marginal improvements.
 
Now I can finally upgrade my P4 660! :p Wow, Anand really went all the way back to show the differences in performance between the generations. In 10 years, performance improved 3x to 20x in those benchmarks.

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techreport has a Haswell review sneak peek up (just cinebench), and I noticed something: AMD hasn't improved single threaded performance in 3 years, and the latest and greatest Piledriver (FX-8350 4.0/4.2GHz) is still only nearly on par with the LGA 1156 i5 750 (2.66GHz) Lynnfield released in Q3'09 in single threaded performance. That's awful.
 
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I'm still planning to upgrade my OLD Core 2 Quad Q6600 to a Haswell-based i5 setup. However, I'm waiting for the updated batch around late-August/early-September, the batch that doesn't have the USB 3.0 bug.
 
Now I can finally upgrade my P4 660! :p Wow, Anand really went all the way back to show the differences in performance between the generations. In 10 years, performance improved 3x to 20x in those benchmarks.

(edit)
techreport has a Haswell review sneak peek up (just cinebench), and I noticed something: AMD hasn't improved single threaded performance in 3 years, and the latest and greatest Piledriver (FX-8350 4.0/4.2GHz) is still only nearly on par with the LGA 1156 i5 750 (2.66GHz) Lynnfield released in Q3'09 in single threaded performance. That's awful.

Yeah, it's both discouraging and encouraging at the same time. Especially those single-threaded Cinebench scores make me happy. When everyone started moving to dual and quad core, it was said that improvements to single-threaded performance was a thing of the past. Before they abandoned Netburst, Intel were planning to have a 10 GHz Pentium 4 out by 2010. Since then we've been stuck at ~3.5 GHz. However when you look at the performance of the Pentium 4 660 (3.6 GHz), even at 10 GHz, assuming perfect scaling it still wouldn't match the single-threaded performance of Haswell. We essentially have the equivalent of a 12+ GHz Pentium 4, even in single threaded workloads.

Of course when you look at AMD, things become pretty sad. They simply do not have a viable upgrade option for my Phenom II X4 from 2009. I don't need more than 4 cores, I need better performance when utilizing between 1 and 4 cores.
 
I think it's safe to say so long to the idea of Haswell boosting Windows 8 and PC sales lol. Then again Tablets are now starting to be considered PC's in some circles.
 
Windows 8 should boost itself, what happened to a company being self reliant? Microsoft should be focusing on how THEY can make their OS successful, not intel.
 
I'm still planning to upgrade my OLD Core 2 Quad Q6600 to a Haswell-based i5 setup. However, I'm waiting for the updated batch around late-August/early-September, the batch that doesn't have the USB 3.0 bug.

I have heard that the production chips being shipped to vendors do not have this bug. Can the Intel rep on this board confirm?
 
Guru 3D was not impressed by Haswell,

http://www.guru3d.com/articles_pages/core_i7_4770k_review,26.html

For gaming it's essentially the same as Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge.

Final words and conclusion

And there you have it, the full Core i7 4770K review, a standalone review and yes, a release that in our mindset is controversial. The PC market is changing and Intel is adapting to that, we see smaller form factors requiring energy efficient yet powerful designs with improved integrated graphics performance. It is abundantly clear that Intel has been successful in creating an architecture that offers both, strong and much improved IGP performance versus better power consumption.

However, the performance PC affcionado's will likely be baffled by today's release if you look at Haswell purely from a processor performance point of view. See, initially the Core architecture of Nehalem was not that much slower than say Sandy Bridge (Core i7 2600). What helped Sandy Bridge were creative Turbo clock frequencies. So when Ivy Bridge was released, we again notice only a tiny small bump in CPU performance. Now we honestly expected faster per core performance for Haswell, instead Intel's leading 4 core SKU is sometimes a tiny bit faster, but sometimes also a hint slower than a Core i7 3770. That does not make much sense and as such Intel needs to ask themselves this question, why should the end-user upgrade if the processor performance remains, give or take, the same?
 
Of course its my luck that my family just went out and bought (yesterday!) 3 laptops lol. Envy 15's, core i5's.
I wouldnt really care THAT much except from the little i have read so far on Haswell, it looks like battery life in laptops (and tablets) is making a huge jump (intel says the biggest jump ever?). Technically if BestBuy releases in the next ...idk less than a month, a new HP Envy 15 i think i can take it in and return it (30 day no questions ask return or something) and get the new one. But then im rolling the dice on a new CPU/Mobo architecture, which could have bugs or manufacturer flaws...

What do you guys think? What would you do?
 
Of course its my luck that my family just went out and bought (yesterday!) 3 laptops lol. Envy 15's, core i5's.
I wouldnt really care THAT much except from the little i have read so far on Haswell, it looks like battery life in laptops (and tablets) is making a huge jump (intel says the biggest jump ever?). Technically if BestBuy releases in the next ...idk less than a month, a new HP Envy 15 i think i can take it in and return it (30 day no questions ask return or something) and get the new one. But then im rolling the dice on a new CPU/Mobo architecture, which could have bugs or manufacturer flaws...

What do you guys think? What would you do?

Odds are Haswell versions of those 3 laptops will walk all over the ones you bought, haswell is a big bump in heat and power savings.

BUT! odds are also that you bought those 3 laptops at prices I hope were severely reduced ahead of the haswell launch and buying haswell equipped models will cost more.

Long story shot, take the return period to price out haswell equivalent models and if they aren't more expensive than you want to pay to swap, return and upgrade but if on the otherhand you landed good clearance pricing on a couple quality models, be happy with them for a few years.The new models might have flaws but the older models have flaws too and OEMs never really fix those kinds of issues, they just release newer models and hope their warranty expires before you can make claims against them. That is why I like a extended warranty for mobile products.
 
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