# Intel Core "Haswell" Refresh CPUs Launch Date Revealed



## btarunr (Apr 10, 2014)

It looks like Intel will launch its Core "Haswell" Refresh line of processors sooner than Computex 2014. According to sources in the IT retail, Intel could launch these new chips, led by the Core i7-4790K, on May 10th in most markets. An armada of new socket LGA1150 motherboards, based on Intel's Z97 Express chipset should launch around those dates, probably in the week leading up to the 10th. Intel Core "Haswell" Refresh processors offer marginally better performance over current Core "Haswell" chips, at existing price points (i.e., they will displace existing chips from their current price-points); while the 9-series chipset offers features such as M.2 SSD support, making you ready for a tidal wave of 1000 MB/s SSDs that will launch around Computex.





Image Source: Hermitage Akihabara

*View at TechPowerUp Main Site*


----------



## ne6togadno (Apr 10, 2014)

?
...


----------



## Fairlady-z (Apr 10, 2014)

Dang...I am getting a Z79 Asus Delux and i74930k delivered today from Amazon? Are new chips and mobos shipping before May 10th?


----------



## Mistral (Apr 10, 2014)

Let's see if this even makes me think of upgrading from my good old 920...


----------



## Fairlady-z (Apr 10, 2014)

Followed the source and looks like its only 1150 socket CPUS, and no X99....skimmed the article. Dang yeah, I would love to have the newest and freshest but the 4930k will have to suffice.


----------



## repman244 (Apr 10, 2014)

Mistral said:


> Let's see if this even makes me think of upgrading from my good old 920...



It's just a refresh, so if Haswell didn't make you think about upgrade you will have to wait another year.


----------



## Slizzo (Apr 10, 2014)

repman244 said:


> It's just a refresh, so if Haswell didn't make you think about upgrade you will have to wait another year.



Which is surprising because Haswell is gobs and gobs more powerful than a 920. The 920 was a great processor sure, but even my Sandy Bridge is much more powerful than it.


----------



## Kaynar (Apr 10, 2014)

Slizzo said:


> Which is surprising because Haswell is gobs and gobs more powerful than a 920. The 920 was a great processor sure, but even my Sandy Bridge is much more powerful than it.



Even most demanding recent cpu-bound games don't need more than a i7 920/930 at 4ghz (all of them should be able to hit 4ghz) to allow gameplay at 60fps.


----------



## tongey54 (Apr 10, 2014)

Kaynar said:


> Even most demanding recent cpu-bound games don't need more than a i7 920/930 at 4ghz (all of them should be able to hit 4ghz) to allow gameplay at 60fps.



It's not always about games. Haswell spanks X58, simples


----------



## zsolt_93 (Apr 10, 2014)

It spanks at consumption too. That i7 at 4.0 must be using like 150W, when haswells rarely go that high even with big oc.


----------



## Hilux SSRG (Apr 10, 2014)

zsolt_93 said:


> It spanks at consumption too. That i7 at 4.0 must be using like 150W, when haswells rarely go that high even with big oc.


 
Does consumption really matter for a high end i7 CPU? 

I own a 920 have never cared for the high wattage and wouldn't care if I bought a high watt 4770k or higher.

I wish Intel would stop catering to low watt.  Speed is what it's about.


----------



## Suka (Apr 10, 2014)

Hilux SSRG said:


> Does consumption really matter for a high end i7 CPU?
> 
> I own a 920 have never cared for the high wattage and wouldn't care if I bought a high watt 4770k or higher.
> 
> I wish Intel would stop catering to low watt.  Speed is what it's about.


Maybe they are catering to their reputation just like nVidia not letting their cards above a certain power limit which would allow higher clock speeds


----------



## Hilux SSRG (Apr 10, 2014)

Suka said:


> Maybe they are catering to their reputation just like nVidia not letting their cards above a certain power limit which would allow higher clock speeds


 
Intel catering to low power has been a huge cash & time sinkhole.  They really should have never lost focus on speed.

These Haswell refresh new MHz rates are just sad compared to what a consumer can overclock.


----------



## Kaynar (Apr 10, 2014)

Hilux SSRG said:


> Intel catering to low power has been a huge cash & time sinkhole.  They really should have never lost focus on speed.
> 
> These Haswell refresh new MHz rates are just sad compared to what a consumer can overclock.



Well currently my 4930K sits at LESS than 20W idle which is very good for my electricity bill on the long run, compared to my previous i7 930 that couldn't downclock from 4ghz and has officially the same TDP, its a very big difference. I am thankful for that.

Personally I think ppl should stop trying to find excuses to upgrade from one generation to another. When you have, for example, a nearly new i7 3770k why would you even bother looking at the spec sheet of the latest updated 4770k? You don't need it. Yet so many threads about this kind of dilemma...


----------



## Hilux SSRG (Apr 10, 2014)

Kaynar said:


> Well currently my 4930K sits at LESS than 20W idle which is very good for my electricity bill on the long run, compared to my previous i7 930 that couldn't downclock from 4ghz and has officially the same TDP, its a very big difference. I am thankful for that.
> 
> Personally I think ppl should stop trying to find excuses to upgrade from one generation to another. When you have, for example, a nearly new i7 3770k why would you even bother looking at the spec sheet of the latest updated 4770k? You don't need it. Yet so many threads about this kind of dilemma...


 
I agree with your second point partially for mainstream users but enthusiasts generally are willing to upgrade more frequently for performance gains, whether single or double digits.

But to your first point, the difference in an electric bill [in the US] will be between $40-80 more per year for the i7 930 versus that i7 4930k.  Really are you glad for several bucks in your pocket versus a theoretical 6/8 core i7 at stock 8Ghz? 

I'm not. 

I'd rather have better gains in power efficiency in PSUs than CPUs and GPUs. I guess there are different enthusiast computer users out there.


----------



## Octavean (Apr 10, 2014)

Fairlady-z said:


> Dang...I am getting a Z79 Asus Delux and i74930k delivered today from Amazon? Are new chips and mobos shipping before May 10th?



Not sure which motherboard you're talking about since I suspect you meant to post Asus *X*79 Deluxe not Z79.  I seem to recall Asus releasing a newer X79 board by the name of "X79 Deluxe" but I guess you just as easily could have intended to say Asus P9X79 Deluxe of which is kind of old (I've had one since about late 2011 or early 2012).

I don't know, I guess you have to go with what is available if you need to upgrade at a given time.  I'd have to check but I thought Haswell-E was to be released in the third quarter of 2014 and we are in the second quarter now.  in fact we are coming close to the middle of April and will be in May soon.  If it were me I would have tried to stick it out until the release of Haswell-E.  It really shouldn't be too far off now,.....

This coming from someone who really thinks his Sandy Bridge-E Core i7 3930K / Asus P9X79 Deluxe system has been a powerful rock sold platform for years and still is,....


----------



## zsolt_93 (Apr 10, 2014)

Stock 8GHz??? That is just stupid. All companies gave up on the clockspeed is performance thingy, when P4 was released. Everyone thought we would see 10GHz CPUs in a few years when the 3.7GHz extremes appeared. They just realized they cant dissipate that heat effectively and they destroy the chip doing it. Die shrinks i think make it even harder as transistor count is increasing and the area effectively decreases and heat has nowhere to escape. Only CPUs i have read of running at 8+GHz were from that gen,  mainly and under LN2, and later gens reach a limit much earlier. If they continued on 90nm to 65nm we maybe would have had larger Clockspeeds now, and CPUs 4 times as huge, consuming 1kW or so with 6 cores. Maybe good for you, but bad for everyone else. Efficiency matters more, and they realized that that particular thinking was inefficient. And now everything is going green. The system i7-920+GTX480/580 from a few years ago is equal roughly to a Haswell i5+750Ti that consumes like what just the 920 would consume overclocked to keep up with time.


----------



## Hilux SSRG (Apr 10, 2014)

zsolt_93 said:


> Stock 8GHz??? That is just stupid. ... Maybe good for you, but bad for everyone else. Efficiency matters more, and they realized that that particular thinking was inefficient. And now everything is going green. The system i7-920+GTX480/580 from a few years ago is equal roughly to a Haswell i5+750Ti that consumes like what just the 920 would consume overclocked to keep up with time.


 

1kw bring it Intel. 

6/8/10/12+ cores bring it Intel. 

It's bad for enthusiasts like myself who haven't had a want or need to upgrade precisely because Intel chose thermal efficiency over speed.     

You and other mainstream consumers may like it or have benefited from efficiency but it doesn't matter to enthusiasts hungry for more speed.  100mhz increments suck.

Heck Intel at GDC recently was stating they need to focus back on what enthusiast/power users want:

"The desktop business is a large and important segment for Intel, and we are investing in it -- reinventing form factors, experiences and products for our customers," said Lisa Graff, vice president and general manager of Intel's Desktop Client Platform Group. "Enthusiasts are the heart and soul of the desktop and they asked us to give them more. We are delivering -- more cores, better overclocking, faster speeds."


----------



## lilhasselhoffer (Apr 10, 2014)

Hilux SSRG said:


> "The desktop business is a large and important segment for Intel, and we are investing in it -- reinventing form factors, experiences and products for our customers," said Lisa Graff, vice president and general manager of Intel's Desktop Client Platform Group. "Enthusiasts are the heart and soul of the desktop and they asked us to give them more. We are delivering -- more cores, better overclocking, faster speeds."



Could I but drugs from her supplier?  Intel lost the soldered chip lid, and their overclocking has been consistently down hill (on average) since.  5+ GHz SB was pretty much a reasonable push while under water, but Haswell is proving to limit around 4.5 GHz (again, on a regular basis).

Anger aside, what is the motivation here?  When the Enthusiast platforms switched from SB to IB there was no PCH refresh.  There's little to no reason to see a refresh on 1150 unless the next generation of chips has hit a significant wall.  On top of the delay, there's the pitiful motivation to upgrade.  Intel claims this is the mainstream offering, but adds support for faster SSDs as their main selling point for an upgrade.  What?  Why would anyone spend the money to upgrade to basically the same thing they could have had months ago?  A slight bump in CPU performance (no numbers leads me to conclude single digits at most), with almost no new features, leads me to believe the selling off of old Z87 stocks at a discounted price will damage the refresh even more.


Seriously though Intel, give the enthusiasts what they want.  VRM belongs on the motherboard, so you can pay for overclocking or save money with a rock solid but less exciting platform.  SATA needs to be copious, because despite the rumors we still use blu-ray drives and HDDs.  Internet connectivity is a must, and Marvell has had some spectacularly crappy chips.  If you can offer us that, and a bit of fun with overclocking potential, I'll bite.  For now the X79 and Z77 platforms aren't worth spending a dime to upgrade from.


Wait a minute, aren't computer sales supposed to be crap...  Me thinks there might be some underlying connection here...


----------



## Aquinus (Apr 10, 2014)

@Hilux SSRG : I think you're misunderstanding limitations of CPUs. You can't just be like "herp derp, lets make the CPU consume 1kw and make it run at 8ghz!!!!" There are barriers other than power that keeps CPUs from running at faster clocks speeds. For example, transistors can only switch so fast and the faster your switch them the worse any clock and/or data slew gets. Additionally, Intel has 12c CPUs, they're E5 v2 Xeons and isn't anything an enthusiast ever would need but a server would. For example, a web server could be serving several thousand HTTP requests per minute. That's a highly threaded workload that works well on multi-core systems and even across multiple servers that have multiple CPUs. Your browser and games are not and probably never will need to be.

Intel's biggest income source are businesses and they care more about stability and less about "overclocking" unless it doesn't compromise stability (boost). People who want to overclock is not what keeps Intel alive, that's for sure.

Also, enthusiast isn't synonymous for wasteful spending. You buy what you need. If you **need** server grade hardware, that is what you get. Otherwise all you're doing is flushing money down the drain unless your goal is just to make your e-peen feel bigger. Most people don't need that power so they would rather have a smaller electricity bill and businesses looking for PCs and laptops are looking for the same thing. Server hardware on the other hand focuses on one very different thing and that's the kind of workload the machine is doing. So don't pull the "enthusiast" card unless you have a particular use case you need your computer to satisfy.


----------



## SKL_H (Apr 11, 2014)

The is no reason to buy high end CPU, I mean people will go all out and 6, 8 or even 12 threaded CPU the is no reason it is just a wast of money, I mean I have the 3570K and it still rocks for and I will use it until intel develops 8th Gen processors. You must just weigh the benefits of upgrading.

"*YOU DON'T HAVE TO SPEND A FORTUNE ON A CPU"
*
the TDP of the CPU is important cause the less the TDP then the less the heat and you also save on electricity, even if you save $30-$40 a year it does make a difference not only to your money but also to the environment  .


----------



## MikeMurphy (Apr 11, 2014)

Hilux SSRG said:


> Intel catering to low power has been a huge cash & time sinkhole.  They really should have never lost focus on speed.



Yeah mobile is wasted effort.  Nobody wants laptop, tablets and cell phones these days....

...............


----------



## MikeMurphy (Apr 11, 2014)

I'm quite excited for the UNLOCKED dual core pentium soon to be released!!  Should be an extremely fun project chip.

It'll probably be a monster for most Windows users, but less so for newer gaming and video transcoding.


----------



## Animalpak (Apr 11, 2014)

Im happy that my Impact motherboard have the support for M.2 SSD


----------



## JDG1980 (Apr 11, 2014)

lilhasselhoffer said:


> Intel lost the soldered chip lid, and their overclocking has been consistently down hill (on average) since.



Haswell Refresh is supposed to feature 'improved thermal interface material' according to the released Intel slides. It's not clear if this means bringing back solder or if they are just going to be more consistent about the lid spacing and dimensions so there isn't an air-gap, but it does seem clear that Intel is aware that enthusiasts have a problem with their current TIM solution and are going to do something to fix it. Hopefully this will mean the end of mandatory "de-lidding" for overclockers.


----------



## lemonadesoda (Apr 11, 2014)

In Europe, where electricity is expensive, especially places like Switzerland, where the unit cost appears OK, but it is then loaded with taxes, taxes, and more taxes, (sales taxes, eco taxes, local taxes, and then the municipality pays for street lighting via taxing your consumption, so tax on tax on tax) the effective cost is approximately 3x the KWh cost compared to US/Canada.  Efficiency is important. On my dual xeon E5472 rig, I pulled one of the xeons to save heat/electricity/cost.  These older xeons just dont downclock or go into efficiency modes like the new CPUs do. Yes, I have lost out on total crunch, but I only need that 2% of the time. 98% of the time my electricity consumption for the rig is now 35% lower. It would be 50% lower if it wasnt for those silly FBDIMMS drinking like there is no tomorrow...


----------



## RejZoR (Apr 11, 2014)

Mistral said:


> Let's see if this even makes me think of upgrading from my good old 920...



Not really imo. I'm still waiting for Skylake...


----------



## Hilux SSRG (Apr 11, 2014)

Aquinus said:


> @Hilux SSRG : I think you're misunderstanding limitations of CPUs. You can't just be like "herp derp, lets make the CPU consume 1kw and make it run at 8ghz!!!!" There are barriers other than power that keeps CPUs from running at faster clocks speeds. For example, transistors can only switch so fast and the faster your switch them the worse any clock and/or data slew gets. Additionally, Intel has 12c CPUs, they're E5 v2 Xeons and isn't anything an enthusiast ever would need but a server would. For example, a web server could be serving several thousand HTTP requests per minute. That's a highly threaded workload that works well on multi-core systems and even across multiple servers that have multiple CPUs. Your browser and games are not and probably never will need to be.
> 
> Intel's biggest income source are businesses and they care more about stability and less about "overclocking" unless it doesn't compromise stability (boost). People who want to overclock is not what keeps Intel alive, that's for sure.
> 
> Also, enthusiast isn't synonymous for wasteful spending. You buy what you need. If you **need** server grade hardware, that is what you get. Otherwise all you're doing is flushing money down the drain unless your goal is just to make your e-peen feel bigger. Most people don't need that power so they would rather have a smaller electricity bill and businesses looking for PCs and laptops are looking for the same thing. Server hardware on the other hand focuses on one very different thing and that's the kind of workload the machine is doing. So don't pull the "enthusiast" card unless you have a particular use case you need your computer to satisfy.


 
I agree to not understanding fully limitations of CPUs but I do understand that Intel's business choices at each nm process have been to favor power efficiency over speed every single time the last few generations.

It's a shame, they have brought about a decrease in innovation with less competition. * I have never met many enthusiasts that want power efficiency in place of speed for i7 systems*.  i3/i5 users crave or may want lower wattage but anyone buying an i7 really wanting low watt is buying a wrong product.

Intel is realizing their mistakes and other competitors [ARM] have stepped into portables/mobiles and may soon get into x86 with a partnership with AMD.




MikeMurphy said:


> Yeah mobile is wasted effort.  Nobody wants laptop, tablets and cell phones these days....
> 
> ...............


 
Intel mobile is a complete waste of time, effort, and money.  What does Intel have to show for it except a failed product category [netbooks] and only select white box tablets that carry intel chips in place of mediatek, nvidia and arm chips? Laptops have benefitted some but are being slowly phased out with other competitive offerings.


----------



## Aquinus (Apr 11, 2014)

Hilux SSRG said:


> I agree to not understanding fully limitations of CPUs but I do understand that Intel's business choices at each nm process have been to favor power efficiency over speed every single time the last few generations.
> 
> It's a shame, they have brought about a decrease in innovation with less competition. * I have never met many enthusiasts that want power efficiency in place of speed for i7 systems*.  i3/i5 users crave or may want lower wattage but anyone buying an i7 really wanting low watt is buying a wrong product.
> 
> ...



Intel makes most of their money off businesses. Businesses want powerful servers which generally benefit from more cores and workstations and laptops that sip power. In a business you get what you need. For example, I have a MacBook Air for work and it will last me the entire day on a full battery with 30% to spare at the end of the day. I don't need my laptop to be a beast because that's what our development server is for.

Also the general consumer doesn't care about over clocking, they just want it to work and not break the bank, and to some extent that is what businesses want too.

The "enthusiast" population is generally pretty small in comparison, so despite your "complaints" about what Intel has to offer, the rest of their sources of income are perfectly happy with the way that CPUs have been going... and I'm perfectly happy with my MBA for work.

Also, I find that people who consider themselves "enthusiasts" build machines that are more powerful than what they really need and put desire over cost effectiveness. I'm not going to presume why that happens as I'm a developer and not a psychologist, but I can tell you that what you're complaining about, most people Intel caters to don't feel the same or probably won't even care for that matter, which would be more of a testament to the job Intel has been doing.

You seem to be under the mistaken impression that what you want is what the world wants. It doesn't quite work that way.


----------



## lilhasselhoffer (Apr 11, 2014)

I'm sorry, but where has this discussion gone.

Intel is focusing on lower power consumption, less heat, and a more integrated package for a good reason.  Intel "mobile" isn't a wasted effort.  It isn't really even a wasted effort on their enthusiast offerings.

The idea that Intel has a distinction between mobile offerings and desktop hardware is foolish.  The laptop, nettop, and tablet are all technically mobile devices.  Each of these devices is also simply a shrink of its desktop and networking counterpart.  The server chip is scaled back into the Enthusiast chip, the enthusiast chip is scaled back into the mainstream offering, and the mainstream offering is scaled back into the mobile devices.  If you want to complain about this production strategy then you can go pay $800 for your next i7 4770k.  Scaling back designs saves money, and achieving goals on your least expensive platform means by the time you hit the enthusiast levels those moderate goals can be far more substantial.

Intel is focusing on heat because it is now a substantial problem.  Previous generations could dissipate larger amounts of heat, because they had less heat generating components in a larger area.  As dies shrink it becomes impossible to have the same thermal output with the exact same processing potential.  For this, Intel has increased thermal efficiency.  That 6 core socket 2011 processor is only possible because Intel decreased thermal outputs from their process.  I'd hazard that if thermal efficiency wasn't pushed that 6 core processor would have half the transistors that it does, and run near destructive temperatures at less than 3.0 GHz.  


I may agree that Intel is being a bit duplicitous in their dealings with enthusiasts, but we aren't a real market.  For every water cooled beast dozens of tablets, a multitude of laptops, and a gaggle of work stations are sold.  Yes, we pay more for the "privilege" of overclocking, but not ten times more.  We seek to push boundaries, and often time spend money on things we don't strictly need (hello Titan).  At the same time, if overclockers didn't exist it'd be a hard sell to make new GPUs and CPUs.  Realistically, there are core2quads out there merrily chugging along in the business world.  Without overclockers, and early adopters, the price of new hardware would kill the markets.  

I believe Intel is trying to make nice with performance enthusiasts, because their last really awesome leap was SB.  If you made that change, then everything since then has been a nearly impossible sell.  Increasing performance by 15%, with an up-front cost of several hundred dollars, just doesn't make a lot of business sense.  Intel is trying to court back enthusiasts, because the mainstream is becoming a more difficult market.  ARM is cheap, and competes well with Intel in the low cost mobile market.  Laptop sales have flagged, because tablets offer enough performance to partially replace them.  Desktop markets have flagged, because upgrading is an expensive action which doesn't have a lot of benefits with what is currently on the market.  The only real market left is the enthusiast, who are willing to pay extra money for minimal improvements in performance.  I can hear them saying that they are courting enthusiasts, I know the track record speaks to the opposite, and I know the lack of competition is making Intel seriously consider how much performance is actually required for an enthusiast platform.  I'd say that I'm jaded enough to not believe their promises, but hopeful enough to want the words to be supported by some action.  Removing that cheap thermal interface material on their mainstream processors is a good start at least....


----------



## Hilux SSRG (Apr 11, 2014)

How many businesses and servers are going to be buying/upgrading to these Haswell refreshes from the previous series?  For all of maybe 1-5%?

My complaints are valid just as are your complaints.  Your reasoning that most enthusiasts wanting power efficiency is flawless.  

My comments are referencing the enthusiast and overclocking user communities and their wants from Intel.  Many feel this way and are the minority to the vast mainstream majority.

You may be happy with Intel's progress, I'm not.  Like it or not we're all stuck with Intel.  I will be glad for the day they get real competition to put them on their ass.


----------



## lilhasselhoffer (Apr 12, 2014)

Hilux SSRG said:


> How many businesses and servers are going to be buying/upgrading to these Haswell refreshes from the previous series?  For all of maybe 1-5%?
> 
> My complaints are valid just as are your complaints.  Your reasoning that most enthusiasts wanting power efficiency is flawless.
> 
> ...



You seem to not understand.  The physics here is simple.  Semi-conductors break down when you bake them, and they can't switch properly as more heat is built up.  This is why Intel focuses on heat.

Let's, for just a moment, think about a car instead of a chip.  In the 60's and 70's the big push was to increase the cubic volume of the combustion chamber.  More volume meant more boom, and more boom drove the cars faster.  Your enthusiast car was fast, with a large volume engine.

Now, assuming this trend continued our engines on super cars would have cylinders as big as the old cars.  Suck in a gallon of atomized fuel, combust, and you'll get to go 200 miles per hour, for the 2 minutes your fuel tank could provide the gasoline.

Do you see super cars with 1000 CC capacities today?  No.  You see cars that developed new technologies.  A turbo or super charger increase the air quantity in a cylinder, creating a more efficient combustion.  Fuel ratios are managed dynamically for the most efficient combustion at a given temperature.  Engines are designed with better cooling systems to increase the change in combustion temperature and ambient temperature, to increase expansion volume of the combustion.  All of these things don't do a lot to speed up a car, but their combined effect is to have a vehicle that actually uses less fuel and goes faster than old cars.


Intel did the same thing.  They gave up on increasing frequency, and focused on thermal performance.  A decrease in temperature output of a few degrees per transistor means more can be packed together.  Increasing core count allows threaded loads to run faster.  Integration of a GPU allows certain encoding to run faster.  Honestly, I'd take a 3770 above almost any Core2Quad.  The core2 might overclock, but that 3770 (yes, not a k) will spank it every which way.  Assuming you go for the 3770k, you get to overclock.  Not everyone's bag, but it allows enthusiasts to say that they managed to push their processor faster than those plebs running at stock clocks.

You might lament the fact that Intel is pushing for power efficiency, but make sure you aren't shooting yourself in the foot.  Those enthusiast 6 core processors only exist because someone at Intel decreased thermal outputs.  They could make a chip 4x the size of current ones, but I'm sure that nobody would pay the $4000+ for a single Enthusiast processor.  If you think I'm wrong, then go out and buy for 4960x systems.  I'll gladly take one off your hands for free, because two of them have enough raw processing power to stomp anything out there.  Donate the third to charity, and consider yourself satisfied with being able to afford more computing power than 99.99% of the population will need in the next decade.

There are very real contentions to be made with Intel's output.  The inclusion of a lackluster graphics core in their high end mainstream CPU is only viable if you're an encoder.  The movement of VRM onto the CPU means that much more heat is near your system's most heat sensitive component.  Thermal paste between the processor and chip lid meant poor performance, even when not overclocking.  All of this is a viable argument, but Intel working to reduce thermal output is not.  You'll never see a 10+ core consumer CPU if they don't make sure that the processor won't incinerate itself during operation.  Your enthusiast chips need that thermal envelope to allow overclocking.


----------



## Popocatepetl (Apr 12, 2014)

Kaynar said:


> Well currently my 4930K sits at LESS than 20W idle which is very good for my electricity bill on the long run, compared to my previous i7 930 that couldn't downclock from 4ghz and has officially the same TDP, its a very big difference.



Huh? Don't blame the CPU if you turned EIST off. The CPU can downclock just fine when idling.


----------



## ypsylon (Apr 12, 2014)

Popocatepetl said:


> Huh? Don't blame the CPU if you turned EIST off. The CPU can downclock just fine when idling.



On certain motherboards it was/is impossible to run OCed CPU with any/all energy efficiency options turned on. Take my  Asus rampage 3 Formula. It works perfectly in power saving mode on stock speed (i7 920), but change frequency by 1 MHz and it won't boot next time (tested couple of those - it is very normal behavior for this board). I had to switch to some other board (and in 2013 choice was not big) from my old and trusty EVGA SLI3 - most of ports burned out after many years. I had no issues running it with CPU OCed with every possible power saving feature enabled. On Asus it is a no go [world famous firmware].

I don't get it why people run rigs which suck power like there is no tomorrow just idling. Power YES please!... but only when it is required. Not just power for the sake of power. Of course people from countries with dirt cheap electricity have it easy...

Haswell refresh in general is pointless, even for 920 owners. X58 is one of best architectures around, with plenty of fuel in the tank.  I don't know even if I will bother with X99 Haswell-E. From what I read nothing spectacular. Certainly it won't be as profound change as upgrade from Pentium 4 to Core 2 [switching VW Golf for Mercedes SLS] and later jump to i7 920/X58 [changing from SLS to Lockheed SR-71 Blackbird].


----------



## Aquinus (Apr 12, 2014)

Hilux SSRG said:


> How many businesses and servers are going to be buying/upgrading to these Haswell refreshes from the previous series? For all of maybe 1-5%?


Not many. It's all the companies that have older hardware that are considering overhauling their mobile fleet, their workstations, or servers. Any company with older hardware might consider upgrades for the company.


Hilux SSRG said:


> My comments are referencing the enthusiast and overclocking user communities and their wants from Intel.  Many feel this way and are the minority to the vast mainstream majority.
> 
> You may be happy with Intel's progress, I'm not.  Like it or not we're all stuck with Intel.  I will be glad for the day they get real competition to put them on their ass.


You may feel that way, and the "minority" might feel that way, but you still don't need more power and weather or not you're willing to accept it, Intel is forcing you to swallow that pill and in the end, it call comes down to Intel trying to improve their bottom line, which is mainly with businesses.

I would also be very careful before speaking for the community. I'm sure that I can find a number of people who are plenty happy with their Intel invests and the improvements over their last platform.


----------



## Solaris17 (Apr 13, 2014)

tongey54 said:


> It's not always about games. Haswell spanks X58, simples


yes it is. unless you are doing synthetic benchmarking their is no reason to move from a 920 or any gen 1 I7 atm. I moved from my W3520 to my 4770k and their is 0 improvement on anything I do on a daily basis. The 2 actual every day differences I see are 1 I have a warranty not and my electric bill is lower. Dont try and persuade these people with unrealistic information. Everyone knows sandy ivy and haswell architecture is better then nehalem. Is it better for anything outside of synthetic benchmarks? no.


----------

