Re:Intel Unleashes Its First 8-Core Desktop Processor
by danh1979 on Saturday August 30, 2014 @12:55PM
(#8246886)
The equivalent Xeons to these i7s, the E5-16xx v3 models, should be out very soon[1][2]. v3 means Haswell. If you need ECC, wait a month or two.
[1] http://www.chiploco.com/intel-haswell-ep-e5-1600-v3-35072/ [2] http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2014/2014080502_Xeon_E5-2600_v...
Re:Intel Unleashes Its First 8-Core Desktop Processor
by Andys on Friday August 29, 2014 @10:59PM
(#8245476)
WOW. That is a huge improvement. Most uses will never see any more than 5-15% more for Haswell.
Re:Intel Unleashes Its First 8-Core Desktop Processor
by nkurz on Friday August 29, 2014 @11:13PM
(#8245497)
I agree, it's certainly higher than it would be in most cases. I have the luxury of being able to design the algorithms to match the strengths of the processor. You rarely see this much improvement unless you are optimizing specifically for Haswell with intrinsics or assembly, although occasionally Intel's compiler manages some magic vectorization I never would have anticipated. And you almost certainly won't see this amount of gain if you are running an older precompiled binary.
The clock speeds are similar, but there are lots of differences under the hood. Whether these matter depends on your use case, but in many situations with integer compression algorithms, I'm finding that I can get 50%-150% better performance per core with Haswell. Partially this is due to the AVX2 instruction set (which adds integer operations for 32B vectors), but more than I'd expected this is due to the BMI/BMI2 instructions and improved memory throughput.