Leaked Intel Haswell Processor Refresh Prices?

3+ years since Sandy Bridge and this is the best they can do? :(

Hopefully someone figures out something in the next couple years so we get better improvements.
 
EODetroit said:
Anyone streaming to Twitch wants better CPUs, both speed and cores. And Twitch isn't exactly "niche" any more. x264 encoding can utilize over 20 cores before diminishing returns kick in, and that's at 1080p, 4K will be able to use over 40 cores before diminishing returns. i7s are significantly better for live encoding while gaming than the i5s that gamers seem to pick for value reasons. The market for this is already large and growing more than most other PC markets. On a somewhat related note, PCs are remarkably better at this than laptops, let alone handhelds (which are wholly unable). Streaming software like Open Broadcaster Software is more than able to push any CPU to its limit, not even the best Xeon on the planet can satisfy the x264 encoder at 1080p; there's always a higher quality preset.
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Even that is being offloaded from the CPU - nVidia GeForce 65x and above (including Kepler and Maxwell) can do most of it, if not all of it, on the GPU, today - and it's not a $200 upgrade any more. There are other hardware methods that can take the load off the CPU as well; they are also becoming mainstream-affordable. I referred to Twitch because Origin (and now XB1) support direct streaming to Twitch within their respective services. Twitch is losing it's niche "cherry" and is becoming mainstream because it is no longer CPU-dependent. The lack of CPU-dependence makes it far more accessible. GPGPU will eventually bring this capability to AMD GPUs, if not their APUs, in the future - the question is not if, but when.
 
rene mauricio said:
I am sorry (not to mention rather ignorant) but I am not sure I follow this whole "need more CPU power to stream" business.

If one were that serious about streaming then why not invest in an NVIDIA GPU and call it a day? NVIDIA's NVREC/ShadowPlay have such a minimal impact on overall performance that it seems like a no brainier if one were into streaming. If anything, what WOULD cause your streams to come out blocky and ugly is not so much GPU vs. CPU encoding but rather the 3500kb/s limit imposed by Twitch. One could argue that if you were that far into streaming that you would have already invested in an external PVR, no?
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PGHammer said:
Even that is being offloaded from the CPU - nVidia GeForce 65x and above (including Kepler and Maxwell) can do most of it, if not all of it, on the GPU, today - and it's not a $200 upgrade any more. There are other hardware methods that can take the load off the CPU as well; they are also becoming mainstream-affordable. I referred to Twitch because Origin (and now XB1) support direct streaming to Twitch within their respective services. Twitch is losing it's niche "cherry" and is becoming mainstream because it is no longer CPU-dependent. The lack of CPU-dependence makes it far more accessible. GPGPU will eventually bring this capability to AMD GPUs, if not their APUs, in the future - the question is not if, but when.
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The problem with NVENC / Shadowplay is that their quality per bitrate is garbage. Yes, if you turn up the bitrate high enough, you can get a high quality save to disk. But for streaming purposes, they look like crap at the bitrates you're limited to (by Twitch and everywhere else I know of, that isn't pay to use). And Twitch isn't the only one setting the limits here, you're limited by your viewer's own download speeds.

Fact is, most people still have crappy internet, and 3500 bitrate is too much for a majority of potential viewers to download without buffering. 2000kbps has been found by the Open Broadcaster community to be the point where most viewers can watch your stream without buffering and is still acceptable quality at 1280x720x30fps (i.e. 720p30). This is using x264 at Very Fast preset, not NVENC. NVENC's quality is somewhere between x264's UltraFast and SuperFast, which is, to put it succinctly, garbage, at those bitrates.

A better option is Intel's Quicksync. The Sandy-era Intel HD Graphics 3000 has a quality per bitrate between SuperFast and VeryFast in terms of x264's presets. Ivy is slightly better, and Haswell's Intel HD Graphics 4600 is actually really quite good, somewhere around Faster or Fast. I would use a Haswell's Quicksync long before I would touch NVENC or Shadowplay for streaming purposes.

Since most games aren't very multi-threaded, or are poorly multi-threaded, there's often a lot of untapped CPU that can be used for software x264 encoding. This is how better quality per bitrate for a nice-looking stream at the bitrates Twitch and Twitch's viewers demand can be achieved. And if you want a high quality looking stream, you need as many fast cores as you can get (diminishing returns around 20 virtual cores for 1080p). Thus, the need for faster and more cored CPU from Intel (and from AMD, if only to push Intel harder).
 
AdamK47 said:
I'm waiting for Haswell-E with X99. It'll be a great upgrade from socket 2011 systems.
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The biggest improvement with Haswell-E will be the 8-core CPU, and it's not going to be cheap. The only other real improvements will be the native USB 3.0 and the extra SATAIII ports, but performance-wise, I'm guessing on only incremental improvements.
 
Zangmonkey said:
Haswell is significantly ahead of Sandy Bridge....
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Significantly is a strong word for the comparison and we are not seeing night and day difference up to 50% increases clock for clock or so, even less noticeable in realtime usage. Not to mention SB still has the overclock headroom Ivy and Haswell both can't compare with. I'd say Haswell is significantly ahead of first gen i7 (Bloomfield, Nehalem excluding the hexacore variants) but definitely not that much ahead of the i5 2500k/i7 2600k/2700k etc.

Unless you need more cores for VM's, rendering and other multicore editing tasks be it photography, audio or video, software right now is playing catch-up (especially with optimisation to take use of extra instruction sets properly) to push our cpu's into full load more efficiently.
 
If I have the cash available I may switch to X99 because I have not been too happy with Sandy-E, especially with my DX79SR board.
 
Matthew Kane said:
Significantly is a strong word for the comparison and we are not seeing night and day difference up to 50% increases clock for clock or so, even less noticeable in realtime usage. Not to mention SB still has the overclock headroom Ivy and Haswell both can't compare with. I'd say Haswell is significantly ahead of first gen i7 (Bloomfield, Nehalem excluding the hexacore variants) but definitely not that much ahead of the i5 2500k/i7 2600k/2700k etc.

Unless you need more cores for VM's, rendering and other multicore editing tasks be it photography, audio or video, software right now is playing catch-up (especially with optimisation to take use of extra instruction sets properly) to push our cpu's into full load more efficiently.
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Significantly ahead in terms if IGP and power consumption, but a 5Ghz Sandy is still very relevant. In fact, another thread (the 771/775 one) demonstrated that an OC'd C2Q at 4.2Ghz is faster in many tasks than a stock Haswell i5 at 3Ghz.
 
Possibly, but I was referring to it's performance. I mean we are at the modern age where almost everything run's cool and uses less power compared to the days of Northwood, Prescott and Presler based cpu's. Out of world differences there.

A C2Q at 4.2GHZ also takes fair bit of effort to reach stably. This includes QX9650's on air, AIO and water.
 
EODetroit said:
The problem with NVENC / Shadowplay is that their quality per bitrate is garbage. Yes, if you turn up the bitrate high enough, you can get a high quality save to disk. But for streaming purposes, they look like crap at the bitrates you're limited to (by Twitch and everywhere else I know of, that isn't pay to use). And Twitch isn't the only one setting the limits here, you're limited by your viewer's own download speeds.

Fact is, most people still have crappy internet, and 3500 bitrate is too much for a majority of potential viewers to download without buffering. 2000kbps has been found by the Open Broadcaster community to be the point where most viewers can watch your stream without buffering and is still acceptable quality at 1280x720x30fps (i.e. 720p30). This is using x264 at Very Fast preset, not NVENC. NVENC's quality is somewhere between x264's UltraFast and SuperFast, which is, to put it succinctly, garbage, at those bitrates.

A better option is Intel's Quicksync. The Sandy-era Intel HD Graphics 3000 has a quality per bitrate between SuperFast and VeryFast in terms of x264's presets. Ivy is slightly better, and Haswell's Intel HD Graphics 4600 is actually really quite good, somewhere around Faster or Fast. I would use a Haswell's Quicksync long before I would touch NVENC or Shadowplay for streaming purposes.

Since most games aren't very multi-threaded, or are poorly multi-threaded, there's often a lot of untapped CPU that can be used for software x264 encoding. This is how better quality per bitrate for a nice-looking stream at the bitrates Twitch and Twitch's viewers demand can be achieved. And if you want a high quality looking stream, you need as many fast cores as you can get (diminishing returns around 20 virtual cores for 1080p). Thus, the need for faster and more cored CPU from Intel (and from AMD, if only to push Intel harder).
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In other words, the lowest common denominator (DSL users) wins again, and the broadcaster must compensate for it.

If that is STILL the case, then even uploading to YouTube would make better sense for most folks than using Twitch (and that is even with having to settle for YT's lowered bandwidth compared to Twitch) simply because most folks don't have the core hardware to stream directly - even 720p - according to you.
 
If you are building right now it only makes sense to get the refresh, if you have the original Haswell it's not worth the time and effort.
 
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