
Intel Core i7-4770K Review: Haswell Is Faster; Enthusiasts Yawn - wesbascas
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-4770k-haswell-review,3521.html
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xyzzy123
CPU doesn't matter on the desktop unless you're doing something wrong or
interesting. Hint: if you're paying for your own CPU intensive thing, try
"engineering sample intel xeon" on ebay.

If you can stand the sunk cost it's a LOT cheaper than AWS. Horses for courses
YMMV etc.

I buy not-for-resale chips on a dodgy basis for fuzzing (MOAR VMS!) but on the
whole, bucks per MIP, or MIPs per watt - who cares?

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mwcampbell
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.

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xyzzy123
Newer xeons are viciously more expensive :/ If you can get away with an older
Xeon and higher power usage, you can get more stuff per dollar per hour.

Mainly, whether MIPs per watt matters depends on where you can get your stuff
racked ;)

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adventured
I guess it depends on how much oomph you really need, but the e3-1230 v2 xeon
is a tremendous processor (9k passmark) and can be had for the low $200s.

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xyzzy123
Intel Xeon X5650 ES 2.66 GHz 12MB 6.4GT/s 95W Hex Core

(x as many as I could afford). That does look like a good chip, but dodgy
engineering sample trays in 2013 you can prolly get twice as many cores. That
means NO WARRANTY and like, not for work.

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fiatmoney
BTW, I find Anandtech's coverage of CPUs to be the best since they actually
dive into some of the architectural decisions. Interesting if you care about
the "whys" behind the benchmarks.

[http://anandtech.com/show/7003/the-haswell-review-intel-
core...](http://anandtech.com/show/7003/the-haswell-review-intel-
core-i74770k-i54560k-tested)

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fiatmoney
One of the other things to note is support for hardware transactional memory.
Applications won't be taking advantage of that for a while, but it could have
a significant impact once libraries are rewritten to take advantage.

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fiatmoney
I really want to see benchmarks for scientific / math-heavy workloads. AVX2 &
FMA3 are supposed to give double the peak FP & integer vector performance.

Unfortunately, it takes time to optimize code for each new architecture, and
most benchmarks don't even bother with a recompile.

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xyzzy123
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?

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fiatmoney
-march=native at least. Something like re-tuning ATLAS at best.

Not really griping that much; eventually people do do those kinds of
benchmarks, but they do take time, and they're not really the target audience
for someplace like Tom's. Understandable they would focus on gaming & general-
use benchmarks.

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xyzzy123
Thanks; I have to admit I didn't know -march=native. I sit a lot in the
debugger (other people's programs) and I never see even SSE let alone all the
other things that could happen. One day the output will change ;)

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iam
Can someone please shed some light on this relatively recent APU race? I
understand it seems like a good idea for OpenCL, but when they increase their
APU performance while actually stagnating their CPU performance I am just
completely lost (as is the case with the i7-4770K).

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?

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smackfu
>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.

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xyzzy123
The NUC (next-unit-of-computing) buzz is cool for robotics too.

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mturmon
I hadn't seen that. There are lots of research oriented robotics projects that
use Apple Mac Minis for compute power. You just bolt on a Mini and you have a
standard environment to run computer vision, learning, or advanced path
planning, communicating with the robot's own computers by UDP, for example.
NUC could be a nice intermediate point between the Mini and full integration
with the robot's own computers.

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xyzzy123
NUC is nice, I measure mine at less than 10 watt for "smash the CPU" tasks,
small form factor, good alternative to ridiculously expensive options like car
PCs. I found it's also voltage tolerant. It's rated at 19v but you can run it
at much less (down to 15).

EDIT: it does go up to nearly 20 watts, depending, esp if you have the HDMI
plugged in. Technically I think you can get more out of a NUC than a mini in
terms of raw MIPs. They're PCs, not toys like RPI.

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mturmon
Thanks for the info. For the robotics use case I mentioned, having a high-
performance system is important because the algos are demanding, so a RPI
would not be very good.

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venomsnake
The overclock on the 4770K is crap if it can be pushed only to 4.4 on air.
Interesting if the 4670K will have more headroom. And review on the integrated
graphics. Why bother? It will be good enough for anything non gaming related
and crap for everything gaming related just like the previous 2 generations.

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bluedino
I'm not sure of the sense in comparing a $129 AMD CPU to a $329 Intel CPU.
Sure, they both have integrated graphics but the budgets of people building a
system with these CPU's are going to be very, very different. It'd be silly to
build a system with an i7 and no discrete GPU when you could use an i3 (or
even a Pentium) and use the savings on video card.

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Retric
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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eropple
Agreed - I still have a Nehalem 875k and was thinking about an upgrade, but
while this stuff is significantly better than mine, I don't think it's
Significant Enough to go build a new computer right now.

The power savings might get me to upgrade my laptop though.

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Arainach
Are we supposed to be surprised by this? Look at desktop sales numbers versus
laptop and mobile sales numbers. Which one would YOU focus on?

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arielweisberg
Any word on fluxless solder vs TIM? For kicks I am going to over clock and
need to know if I should gird my loins for delidding.

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raphaelj
Wow, the AMD FX8350 is pretty good, knowing it competes against 65% higher
priced CPUs.

Performance per watt is another story through ...

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chipsy
Way more interested in what it will do for notebooks. I've let myself wait
until this generation to do a refresh.

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kunai
Oh great, now even Intel's gone with a "flat design" logo.

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ninetenel
who gives a shit about a logo

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Argorak
Enough people for companies to invest into theirs.

