INTRODUCTION...
Why the name “Haswell” gives me an intense urge to begin rhyming, I’m unsure, but what I am sure of is that this is a rather interesting “Tock” release from Intel. Haswell CPUs are built-upon a 22nm process like the 3rd-gen Ivy Bridge chips were, but under the hood, Intel has retooled a lot.
In terms of new features, it’d be difficult to call Haswell the most interesting Tock release from Intel since the company began its Tick/Tock cadence in 2006, but in terms of actual architecture design, it’s the best it’s ever released. However, it’s important to not expect major performance gains here over last-gen; effectively, if you’re already equipped with an Ivy Bridge PC, there’s no reason to upgrade unless you’re planning to move up to a larger model. It’d be ridiculous to move from a Core i7-3770K to an i7-4770K, for example. If you’re rocking an older rig, especially older than the i7-2xxx series, Haswell is worth looking into.
Those hoping to get a reprieve from the socket roulette game that Intel plays with any new architecture release haven’t been thrown a bone with Haswell. Despite the similar size, Intel has adopted a new LGA1150 socket for use with Haswell. While that sucks for those who own LGA1155 and were hoping to upgrade, the change is for a legitimate reason: there have been a ton of power-related changes made here, so it simply wasn’t possible to retain last-gen’s socket.
Outside of IGPs and TDPs, the trio of i7-4770 models are spec’d identically to their i7-3770 predecessors. Interestingly, despite the power-related overhauling Intel has done with Haswell, the K and non-K models are spec’d 7W higher. We’d assume that it’s the IGP upgrade that has caused this boost; as we’ll see later, both the i7-3770K and i7-4770K deliver about the same overall load in our tests (with the IGP out of the picture).
Intel might have made an awful lot of changes to the Haswell architecture over Ivy Bridge, but the general function layout remains identical:
As with the previous couple of generations, Intel packs graphics, a memory controller and PCIe lanes into the CPU, which negates the need for an entirely separate chip on the motherboard. The biggest 4th-gen Core models include 8MB of L3 cache, while the middle-of-the-road i5′s include 6MB (i3′s include 4MB; Pentiums, 3MB).
Regarding efficiency, there are a handful of reasons why Haswell is Intel’s best-ever architecture. As seen in the diagram below, the Unified Reservation Station (task scheduling) has had two ports added; one to improve integer performance, the other for improved store address calculation. In addition, the L2 TLB has been increased in size, and wide vector units have had their bandwidth doubled. Virtualization latencies have been reduced as well.
A new CPU isn’t a new CPU without a new instruction set or two, and Haswell has got us covered. AVX2 has been added to the mix, which enables support for 256-bit integer vectors, and FMA3 (fused multiply-add) support has also been added. Any media-related workload that supports either of these two instructions should see a great performance improvement.
General performance improvements haven’t been a major focal-point of Intel’s for a while, as it aims to get its processors into every device imaginable, from servers to smartphones. Thus, Haswell’s power system has been overhauled to keep power usage low at home, and battery-life long while on the go.
You can’t have a brand-new CPU architecture without brand-new chipsets, so to fill the void is Z87, H87, H81, Q87, Q85 and *catches breath* B85. The contents of the flagship Z87 chipset can be seen in this diagram:
In addition to those PCIe lanes driven by the CPU, the Z87 chipset adds support for 8x x1. Other functionality includes 6x USB 3.0, 14x USB 2.0, Gigabit Ethernet, Intel Audio and support for up to DDR3-1600 (faster RAM can of course be used).
Final Thoughts...
At this article’s outset, we established all of what makes Intel’s Haswell architecture so noteworthy. We always expect performance to be improved from one architecture to the next, and of course, we expect the same for power-efficiency. Here, though, Intel has retooled a lot in the quest for the ultimate of both worlds. As we’ve been able to see throughout all of our testing, it’s succeeded. Our power results above are an exception, but it’d take a notebook to prove the enhancements there to us, given that’s where power consumption is really important.
Power stuffs aside, Haswell isn’t going to be a “must-have” architecture for those who rock a PC a generation or two old. The reason to upgrade in that particular case might be to get the most feature-rich motherboards the planet has ever seen, and support for things like PCIe 3.0 and improved SATA 3.0 / USB 3.0 performance. Over Ivy Bridge, Intel estimates users will see a 5~10% performance increase. GPU-wise (IGP), that figure can jump to 2x. Battery-life? +50% for most workloads.
Thank's For Reading My Review.
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