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Hey Gerbils.

My HTPC is all very decent and modern in some regards, but the SSD and graphics card are being hampered by an old Core2Quad (on DDR3, oddly enough). I'm torn between replacing it with a Haswell i5, or bumping my 3770 and Z87 board down to the HTPC from the desktop. I'm usually interested in either Xeon/server architecture or sweet-spot pricing for desktop products, so I've been pretty half-assed about following news on Intel's next generation platform. I'm not usually an early adopter but since Intel's last three generations have been almost indistinguishable on the desktop, maybe that's not such a big deal when looking at an Intel CPU/chipset combination.

TR has a few little news snippets but not enough to give me expected processors, launch times, likely prices etc.
Is that info leaked or speculated on anywhere yet or is Broadwell still too far away to have any relevant information?

Cheers!

Tom's says 2H 2014, and that could be anywhere from July 1 to December 31 (and yes that's old, but I don't think it's really changed, either).

My belief is that it's going to be like going from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge - a small step up in performance, and lower power draw. You're on the same socket with an evolution of the same chipset. Nothing terribly exciting. I think you'll wind up with 95% (made-up figure) of Broadwell's performance improvements (over Core 2 Quad) today with a Haswell setup.

derFunkenstein wrote:

Tom's says 2H 2014

Yeah, but is that Broadwell on the desktop, or just laptops? I thought the rumor mill said the mobile chips were coming first by a ways. If true, of course, that doesn't necessarily mean desktop won't be this year, might just be later in 2H.

Haswell-E is also coming 2H 2014, with apparently 8 cores and DDR4 if you're interested in an LGA2011 platform.

I would only wait for Broadwell if you want Iris Pro graphics, as Intel should be releasing a socketed desktop chip both unlocked and with Crystalwell/Iris Pro. I think that'll make for a pretty amazing HTPC, but it'll likely be costly.

Given that Devil's Canyon Haswell CPUs aren't released yet (supposedly mid-2014 launch) I wouldn't expect desktop Broadwell until LATE 2014 or early 2015. (It's slated for 2H 2014, but not to make the back-to-school season, so...November/December to hit Christmas?)

Not much has leaked on Broadwell yet, but Devil's Canyon is what I'd be looking forward to if you're swapping your IVB to your HTPC. If you're looking for an HTPC refresh, Broadwell is probably the better option (power-wise) if you can wait.

Itchy feet might be athlete's foot. Might want to get it looked at

In my mind plain-jane quad-core Broadwell is snoozeworthy.

I'm also not really into overclocking these days, ruling out Devil's Canyon - seems mostly pointless for what I do - but I could use a 6 or 8 core on the workstation easily enough. I have spent the last six months telling myself that a Xeon E5-2640 v2 is too slow for a single thread to be a good idea, but that's the sort of budget I can justify.

Is Haswell-E likely to be DDR4 only? That'll jack the already high prices even higher....

Chrispy_ wrote:

In my mind plain-jane quad-core Broadwell is snoozeworthy.

I'm also not really into overclocking these days, ruling out Devil's Canyon - seems mostly pointless for what I do - but I could use a 6 or 8 core on the workstation easily enough. I have spent the last six months telling myself that a Xeon E5-2640 v2 is too slow for a single thread to be a good idea, but that's the sort of budget I can justify.

Is Haswell-E likely to be DDR4 only? That'll jack the already high prices even higher....

http://www.anandtech.com/show/7874/hasw ... s-x99-ddr4

I'm guessing it will only be DDR4. I doubt Intel wants to bake in DDR3 and 4 support. Who knows though.

IMO, Devil's Canyon is pretty exciting. New packaging, new TIM, it should have higher base clocks so single thread performance should be up (albeit not a ton), and it's S1150 which Intel has stated will allow a drop in for Broadwell (BIOS update, of course) on 9 series boards. I also personally like that it is on a more mature 22nm process too. This is all assuming you're coming from a few generations previous though. I don't think I could justify an upgrade from SB, IVB, or H for this.

I suppose I should say that I switched from a 5GHz 2500K to a 3.4GHz 3770 because I needed threads more than clockspeed.
For this reason alone, Devils canyon is going to be of no benefit to me - I already have 8 threads and when I occasionally game on it the 3.4GHz is fast enough.

I think this is why I'm getting itchy feet in the first place. I spend way more time gaming (somewhat sociably) on the Core2 which just isn't gaming current-gen titles as smoothly as I used to. I guess that's just the low IPC of an outdated architecture for you...

Chrispy_ wrote:

I suppose I should say that I switched from a 5GHz 2500K to a 3.4GHz 3770 because I needed threads more than clockspeed.
For this reason alone, Devils canyon is going to be of no benefit to me - I already have 8 threads and when I occasionally game on it the 3.4GHz is fast enough.

Well Broadwell isn't going to be much if any of a performance boost. It's a die-shrink generation, so really devil's canyon won't be that different performance-wise. Broadwell will probably ~5% better IPC unless there's something I've forgotten about. The announced desktop, unlocked Iris Pro Broadwell chip should deliver some appreciable performance boosts, though we have no idea on price or default clocks for it yet.

I'd expect the stuff to launch in June, was the same month for some past launches from Intel. Especially since the boards already went live.

To echo previous posters, desktop Broadwell isn't worth the wait unless you want the IGP. It's also a long ways off.

Might want to wait for Haswell E and move the 3770 to the living room at that time. Yes you will need DDR4, but that's exciting isn't it!

homerdog wrote:

Might want to wait for Haswell E and move the 3770 to the living room at that time. Yes you will need DDR4, but that's exciting isn't it!

You say that, but I don't want to even guess at what 32GB of decent DDR4 is going to cost when Haswell-E launches.

Kougar wrote:

homerdog wrote:

Might want to wait for Haswell E and move the 3770 to the living room at that time. Yes you will need DDR4, but that's exciting isn't it!

You say that, but I don't want to even guess at what 32GB of decent DDR4 is going to cost when Haswell-E launches.

Yeah, I'm not even sure that anything I do is bandwidth limited on dual-channel 1333MHz DDR3. Quad-channel 2011 platforms seem to get similar scores if you look at similar core counts & clockspeeds as if more-than-doubling the memory bandwidth is irrelevant.

I've not really looked at DDR4 tech yet but it's looking very much like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist yet.

Chrispy_ wrote:

Yeah, I'm not even sure that anything I do is bandwidth limited on dual-channel 1333MHz DDR3. Quad-channel 2011 platforms seem to get similar scores if you look at similar core counts & clockspeeds as if more-than-doubling the memory bandwidth is irrelevant.

I've not really looked at DDR4 tech yet but it's looking very much like a solution to a problem that doesn't exist yet.

Well it still offers some percentage points of improvement. And for users that run 24/7 loads on 6-8 core chips it's gonna add up. I'm just happy to see higher clocks at lower voltages, I remember when RAM overheating used to be a problem!

But that said I agree with ya, I'd hate to be an early adopter given the premiums for 8-core chips, Intel's X-chipset premium, and Quad-channel DDR4 super-premiums. As much as I love the tech Has-E is going to be one expensive platform.

Chrispy_ wrote:

Yeah, I'm not even sure that anything I do is bandwidth limited on dual-channel 1333MHz DDR3. Quad-channel 2011 platforms seem to get similar scores if you look at similar core counts & clockspeeds as if more-than-doubling the memory bandwidth is irrelevant

They don't in the memory bandwidth benchmark!

Small benchmark programs are likely to fit well in large caches and with HT there to allow useful work to be done, when a core is blocked waiting for memory access mitigating load/save stalls. The story on access times, may be different particularly on not very multi-threadable poorly tuned software which may not have good locality of reference, have less predictable access reducing benefit of out of order, or have cache line bouncing.. for example perhaps because things like garbage collection are going on.

For mainstream systems, that people buy, they're probably over-whelmingly limitted most of the time by access to HDD storage, or in certain programs by RAM capacity. The idea of "good enough" applies. If you've really got specialised requirements, then evaluating by specific benchmark is the best answer. Gamer benchmark stuff is showing the graphics card ought have much more of the budget than the CPU, if you're maximising value and "balancing" the system.

I think most people intuitively over rate the importance of CPU speed, though when specc-ing a new system the marginal cost of faster is often justifiable, most CPU upgrades are probably vanity driven, rather than cost effective especially compared to storage upgrades like SSD's.

Kougar wrote:

homerdog wrote:

Might want to wait for Haswell E and move the 3770 to the living room at that time. Yes you will need DDR4, but that's exciting isn't it!

You say that, but I don't want to even guess at what 32GB of decent DDR4 is going to cost when Haswell-E launches.

Ya it will be high for a few months, however during that time we will more than likely see DDR3 continue to rise as ram manufactures start to ramp down DDR3 production and ramp up DDR4 production. It happens with every generation of RAM.