Intel Core i7-4770K Review: Haswell Is Faster; Enthusiasts Yawn

I think watts per unit of performance is most important, as long as the more energy-efficient CPU isn't exhorbitantly more expensive, since we only pay for the hardware itself once but pay for energy continually.

Personally what I consider more interesting than the actual engineering sample chips is the "NDA" Preliminary Specification Updates that describes errata in these chips including steppings dating back to A0. Wonder if they are NDA after the product launched?

I see a few of these: "•RARE• Intel Pentium III Xeon Engineering Sample"

That should be a way to do something wrong and interesting.

I don't even know the CPU flag to specify to go "I have the absolutely latest CPU". Generally all the scientific libraries have vectorised asm for the tight loop stuff. So what is a benchmark person gonna do?

Speaking as someone writing a bunch of numerical code, while the fma and avx2 stuff is neat, that's not the part I find exciting. Those alone just naively give 2-4x boost

The main exciting part of avx2 is that I can have more of a matrix in registers at a time. Depending on the details of the matrix multiply algs etc, this reduces the volume of loads and stores by some neat factor.

Likewise the support for gathers is neat, and makes for better performance with some of the standard matrix layouts that fundamentally have bad strides access.

What I'm really excited about is the parallel bit deposits / extract operations. They're meant for making it easy to write arbitrary bit permutation functions in a small number of rounds, but potentially could be used to support fast indexing into some nonstandard linear algebra layouts that have substantially better memory locality. I'm talking layouts that easily compete with blas / atlas etc with a lot less engineering work.

I'm really excited to get my hands on some haswell hardware in the coming months to experiment thusly.

Context for me being that I'm writing tools in Haskell to generate and run numerical codes and I think some of the things Haswell enabled are quite swell.

There's also that htm concurrency machinery that'd be neat to mess around with too.

>What is the market for desktop CPUs where the desktop buyers don't also have dedicated video cards which can do a almost a magnitude better job than the APU?

Small form factors, like the iMac or Mac mini. Apple is pretty influential in Intel's roadmap nowadays. See also how the next-gen mobile chipsets are getting more powerful onboard GPUs to drive Retina displays.

We should be leveraging the APU compute engine in opengl and opencl tasks to get more performance out of the system (maybe not gl, since it took a decade for ATI/AMD and Nvidia to properly support just having 2 of the exact same card work in parallel).

In practice, with the advent of compute shaders and opencl, there is very little intense serial work that can't be done in parallel. My workflow nowadays is (using python as an example)

Slow? (assuming we know why it is slow and it isn't just maligned algorithmic complexity making something a runtime exponential where you can use a quadratic) -> Put it in C++. Still slow? -> Parallelize into tasks and put in a work threadpool (assuming there is a lot of this kind of work happening, else just numcores / X threads do stuff). Still slow? -> Port over to opencl (or if memory copies are unnecessary, opengl compute shaders) and keep the old implementation for backwards compatibility with systems lacking them.

GPUs yield a higher core density and are more efficient in certain situations. This appears to be where the arms race is in HPC these days. Every cpu maker is trying to be the first to cross the finish line with a general purpose GPU solution these days(with a traditional CPU strapped to it's back to run the os). Rumor has it that nvidia will have an arm platform soon. I'm sure Intel and AMD are afraid of this. They want to have something in the pipeline that is competitive before this happens.

The way the market is going these days, consumer devices will soon almost all be based around low power/small footprint solutions(e.g. atom, mobile, arm). Heck, it probably won't be too long before we start seeing some serious SOC solutions(what could a raspberry pi type device do in 2 years with a 4 or 6 core arm at it's core). So, that kills margins on the consumer market more or less. Or, well, at least it becomes a race to the bottom. What's left is enterprise and "the cloud", where efficiency and iops still rule. For these companies, CPU speed isn't a bottleneck, it's mostly core and io density. They simply want to run more jobs in a smaller space, not necessarily run the jobs faster. So engineering teams are starting to look very closely at GPUs as a means to get a huge improvement in core density for certain situations at the cost of having to rethink some of the software stack. Putting the GPU on the same die as the CPU makes a lot of sense from this perspective.

It'll be interesting to watch. If nvidia does have an arm platform in the works, they may win this race, though intel does have a huge advantage with being able to run multiple foundries at one. Part of me wants to believe that intel is capable of doing much more with their APU solutions, but are simply waiting until the future of the market is clearer. Once that happens, they may be able to beat everyone else simply by timing the market on newer designs(like how intel beat AMD after screwing up with itanium and P4).

Note: Having a low power SOC type solution is another side effect of all this, but I don't think that's the primary motivator for Intel's efforts here. Maybe for the atoms, but not this chip.

It's not really a desktop processor; it's a laptop processor that's being reused for the desktop market. Gamers might prefer a GT0 configuration but I guess the market isn't large enough to justify it.

Unless you play demanding videogames there is litte point to having a discrete videocard so it's still a valid comparison. That said I have a 2600k @4ghz and there does not seem to be any reason to even consider an upgrade which I find rather disappointing.

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