waiting hashwell...

[RamonGTP]

I knew you were exaggerating, but that large a figure seems like the person saying it thinks the unit is more powerful than it really is. That said, I did not know it was someone else's claim.

 

[octoberasian]

Not Haswell related, but for the PS4 APU, you have to realize that the GDDR5 memory is not limited by the speeds of a typical DDR3 memory controller found in AMD's current APU lineup. The bandwidth and memory speeds will be much greater and any sign of bottlenecking may be the fault of the developer and not the hardware itself. So, since the memory space is shared between graphics and data, there should not be any bottlenecking or noticeable ones at that. When we look at the rumored Xbox 720 specs with 8GB of DDR3, Microsoft will have to utilize some kind of programming magic to work within the limited and smaller bandwidth of a DDR3 memory controller. But, it'll be cheaper to produce and should come in a shade under the possible price of a $399 PS4 unit.

And, as for the APU being an 8-core custom Jaguar APU (2x 4-core Jaguar compute module), it may make developers fully utilize all 8 threads. This may be a boon to us gamers as majority of the games we have today use no more than two threads, while very few benefit from four or more threads of a processor. So, when console ports start happening from PS4 (and eventually Xbox 720) games, they may actually be fully multi-threaded compared to current games.

(One can only hope though...)

The Jaguar APU looks promising, and it's looking to be a rather power-efficient, powerful processor. It may not beat the likes of a 3770K, but for what it is and what it's meant to do in a closed, fixed system configuration, it'll do just fine. You have to remember that the Jaguar APU is first and foremost a mobile processor. If you look at what current high-end tablets and smartphones can do with a powerful Exynos, Qualcomm, Apple Ax, or Tegra 3 processor matched with a powerful GPU, the games (the very good ones), look as good as PS2 games and many times better than them. And, some mobile games are as good as many DirectX 9 games on the PC market today. So when you pair a power-efficient mobile processor with a much, MUCH more powerful GPU-- a Radeon HD 7850-equivalent GPU-- the games will probably look as good as most DirectX 10 or 11 games on the market today. That'll be entirely dependent on the game developer themselves. If a mobile game developer can work a game around a 1.4 to 1.6 GHz mobile processor and a mobile GPU, imagine what can be pulled off with a slightly more powerful 1.6GHz mobile CPU ("Jaguar"-based) and a Radeon HD 7850-equivalent GPU in a fixed system configuration.

As for Haswell, we have a long ways to go to know if it's more powerful than current SB/IVB processors. All I can say for sure is that power efficiency has improved a lot especially considering that Haswell-E and server processors Haswell-EN/EP may use less power than current SB-E/IVB-E processors using the same number of core configuration-- 4 cores up to 10 maximum. That's pretty incredible in and of itself.

A six-core Haswell-E will probably be more energy efficient than a 3930K, in other words.

 

[Blackbird]

When Haswell-E is out it will make more sense to buy Haswell-E than it makes sense to buy SB-E now because Haswell-E comes with the new TSX instructions so games will utilize 6+ cores better right?

 

[Rogue007]

I thought the statistic was so wild that you would know that I was kidding.........

Besides I only said that because the person I was referring to used the same stat...It was a poke out how inaccurate it was.

lol, you guys are nit picking now.

I've tried to find the article where I read that figure of the i7 3770 being 1000% more powerfull than the 'Jaguar' cpu, but I can't find it
But I def read it somewhere, I thought it was Tomshardware but I've searched back through their articles and it wasn't them. Never mind
That said, the same article also said that the Jaguar cpu is also much more powerfull than anything ARM based.

Back to Haswell, I think the main improvements with it will be power consumption. Intel is determined to get a bigger slice of the mobile market. Anandtech recently did an article testing the power usage of Ivybridge compared to ARM, and it wasn't far behind at all. With Haswell it may be that Intel will have an all round better cpu for mobile computing than ARM. Offering similar power consumption with better performance.
This is Intels main focus I believe at the moment, as for performance, they have no real competition at the moment as AMD's flagship cpu's cannot compete with Intels midrange such as the i73770. Intel is all by itself in the high end with it's SandybridgeE. This is why we are so long seeing a replacement.

 

[Rogue007]

When Haswell-E is out it will make more sense to buy Haswell-E than it makes sense to buy SB-E now because Haswell-E comes with the new TSX instructions so games will utilize 6+ cores better right?

This will depend on developers. If they make use of the new instruction sets then yes. But this is something that will only benefit pc's and not consoles, which is where the moneys at, so they may not be so motivated to engineer the new instructions into their code.

 

[Shadohh]

This will depend on developers. If they make use of the new instruction sets then yes. But this is something that will only benefit pc's and not consoles, which is where the moneys at, so they may not be so motivated to engineer the new instructions into their code.

It is my understanding that adding TSX support to your program will be relatively simple, but who knows.

 

[Fort_Major]

I've tried to find the article where I read that figure of the i7 3770 being 1000% more powerfull than the 'Jaguar' cpu, but I can't find it
But I def read it somewhere, I thought it was Tomshardware but I've searched back through their articles and it wasn't them. Never mind
That said, the same article also said that the Jaguar cpu is also much more powerfull than anything ARM based.

It was probably the article showing the AES Instruction set that allowed Intel to encrypt almost exactly 10x faster than the AMD equivalent. Quite useful in business applications that rely on AES, but beyond that the normal Intel versus AMD in business/server applications.

 

[Fort_Major]

It is my understanding that adding TSX support to your program will be relatively simple, but who knows.

Probably the best main-stream benefit from TSX would come from transparency not, so much from application developers but from

a) Parts of the OS being optimized to take advantage of this
c) The Server Stack: IIS/Apache/MySQL/MS SQL
b) Platform rewrites: PHP, Python, .NET,

This way every day applications would benefit from it.

TSX advantages if any could easily be 5 years away, depending upon the uptake from these companies.

 

[kingduqc]

Uh at this point, I'm not even sure if most server usage would register the difference between DDR3 vs DDR4.

It was during the initial introduction of HyperTransport that they began having trouble flooding the memory controller/memory bw via synthetic method.

In a perfect world it would be time to focus less on the DDR and more on the memory controller(s). Offload a bunch of crap that both Linux and Windows do quite horribly and slowly onto the memory controller.

Why do people even care then? Specially on a mainstream platform. I've never understood the point of buying high end speed ram. Is it a waste or i'm just clueless

 

[alek]

what is the new port called. when will these mobos be avaliable? will anything but cpu port be different on them?