Is Haswell overhyped (and somewhat let everyone down)?

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Comp625

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I have been keeping an eye out for a ~13.3" light/small notebook that is capable of light gaming. Mind you, I have a hardcore desktop that can satisfy my FPS needs. This would be more for games like Civ, SimCity, etc. Since I am not in an immediate need of a notebook, friends have been telling me to wait until Haswell later this year.

In reading a lot of material about Intel's current-gen HD4000, it seems that when paired with a ULV processor, performance is actually quite limited due to the lack of thermal headroom. This Anandtech article sums up that dilemma by benchmarking games in ULV i5 vs non-ULV i7.

Fast forward to 2013: we know Haswell is going to have three variants (GT1, GT2, and GT3). Am I correct to assume that in lighter notebooks (future Asus Zenbook Primes, future Microsoft Surface Pro's, and other devices with a small form factor) will be bottlenecked by the same thermal headroom - or lack thereof? Thus, will Haswell be a bit of a letdown if using a ULV CPU/iGPU setup?

P.S. I am very aware of the performance advancements that Intel (and to be fair, AMD) has brought with the integrated GPU on both desktop and mobile fronts. My curiosity is more relative to performance gains over existing HD4000 vs AMD's integrated Radeon's vs. discrete GPU's.
 
Personally i think Intel is milking us out of the lack of pressure from companies, like AMD. The preformance increase as a CPU is very low, many say inside 10%...at the same time i think intel is focusing on iGPUs right now, specially to compete more with AMD in the only aspect that was losing.

But at the same time the preformance increase over the HD4000 seems considerable, with the GT3 5200, some sites place it around twice as fast, close to a GT640m, so its a nice upgrade. Now i dont share completly what you say in terms of desktop GPU wont be getting the high end integrated gpus.... so its more aim for laptops, probably more for ultrabooks. I really was hopping for to end iGPUs on desktop chips and have Nvidia work their optimus to desktops, but this seems not to be case.

But there will be other laptops that are not ultrabooks that might fit what you are looking, for example Acer released their 3820TG, which had a ATi 5850 on it, switchable with intel iGPU, it was imo very nice design with dual fans (one for the cpu and one for the gpu), but they didnt follow up in the 3830TG that only had one fan... but who knows maybe the 3840TG (if they make it) might become a decent 13'' gaming laptop. Sager also released the NP6110 a small 11.6'' gaming laptop with a dedicate gpu (GT650m), you can even upgrade it to a quad. Sony also had their Z line some years ago with a high res screen and dedicated gpu, so there will be options out there, but i would wait for haswell to see what new laptops or refreshes come out and if they are viable for what you are looking, personally i never seen ultrabooks as gaming laptops, but to each to their own.

If you really think its going to be thermal limitation wait for Rockwell, that should lower the manufacturing process, and probably will lower the heat and consumption.
 
I dont think Intel is worried about increasing CPU speed because current CPU's are already more than capable enough to handle desktop duties. And with nobody really buying desktop PC's anymore but everybody and their brother buying tablets and laptops (although laptops are dwindling in sales) Intel is going to be focusing on onboard graphics, battery life and things like that. Hell even AMD is focussed more on those things.

I don't see either Intel or AMD making any great strides in raw CPU horsepower anytime soon in anything other than mobile platforms. If rumors are true that they're going to skip IB-E, that should be a big clue that they're not really worried about desktop performance and AMD has all but said as much.
 
The IPC is another incremental bump of 10-15% and the clock speeds are stable, so Haswell isn't going to bring any massive performance advantage.

The GT3 variants of the GPU are likely to be very good for the low TDP products (Ultrabooks at ~17W), but those chips are also very expensive considering its eDRAM. The GT3 parts don't make any sense in a 35W+ notebook or even desktop, imo. At that TDP range you can buy a better GPU and will have room to fit it.

What Haswell brings that should be a substantial improvement are the new sleep/idle states and AVX2. The former is very nice for portable devices while the latter won't see any developer attention for 3-5+ years.

I don't think it was ever overhyped. Every single new chip gets hyped and then the fanboys quickly fall back down to earth. Haswell should be no different. If folks are looking for very good perf-per-watt, then I'm sure Haswell will deliver. If people are expecting groundbreaking performance...well...
 
Yeah, Haswell will be great for thin ultrabooks and products like the Surface Pro. I don't think larger, "performance" laptops will see much of a gain.
 
IGPs are not suitable for all gamers, including the ones in AMD APUs. Low end performance is still low end performance even if it's "teh fastest IGP evah!"

/pointing out the obvious
 
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