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***Official Intel Haswell Thread***

Undesirable said:
Well most CPUs are "this and that." What would be less boring to you? Spongebob Squarepants engraved on the CPU lid?
Click to expand...

I've got to say that if I were weighing up the pros and cons of trying to justify an upgrade, that might just be enough to tip the scales and seal the deal!
 
so enthusiasts currently on a q6600 and some requirement for value are a bit stuck...

going into socket 1150 will never allow for 8 cores as far as haswell/broadwell roadmaps suggest.

investing in current socket 2011 is a bit too late as the socket is being superceeded and memory is changing.

intel getting their own back for the great value in the [email protected] Ghz...

no obvious way forward.
:-(
 
@ginjaninja: The spectacular, long lived upgrade to the Q6600 was the i7 920. A solid argument can be made for the 980X too, that was unusually good value for an "X" chip. Today the best option, in my limited and poorly tested option, appears to be the 3820 on SB-E.

It doesn't matter greatly that the socket is superseded, that happens every 12 months or so anyway. It'll take 64gb of ram at a reasonable cost today, and by the time 64gb isn't enough, DDR4 may have faded into the past as well.
 
JonJ678 said:
Today the best option, in my limited and poorly tested option, appears to be the 3820 on SB-E.

It doesn't matter greatly that the socket is superseded, that happens every 12 months or so anyway. It'll take 64gb of ram at a reasonable cost today, and by the time 64gb isn't enough, DDR4 may have faded into the past as well.
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Plus there's the upgrade path to IB-E later this year with new 4/6 and maybe 8 core CPU's.
 
One hopes so - but it's difficult to be sure until the chips hit the shelves. There's also the question of whether a motherboard refresh will result, even if backwards compatibility is maintained, and thus whether the new boards will be markedly better than the old.

I'm increasingly sure that the way to go with computers is (cpu+mb+ram) then run it into the ground as a single, not-periodically-upgraded unit. Perhaps I'm just getting lazy though.
 
Well EVGA are getting ready to launch a new X79 board in the run up to IB-E and you would *assume* they wouldn't be doing that if X79 is getting a refresh (plus nothings come out of Intel about that).
 
ubersonic said:
Plus there's the upgrade path to IB-E later this year with new 4/6 and maybe 8 core CPU's.
Click to expand...

could just about stomach buying a 2011 'premium chipset/platform' at 'the end of line' if 8 cores were announced on it, but at the moment this is wishful thinking?

is there anything known about the underlying chipset 'bandwidth/performance' to imply whether current (2011) or upcoming (new 2011, 1150) desktop chip sets could accommodate 8 cores and not be like ' a 3000cc engine into a mini'. ie give an indication on likelyhood/possibility (in absence of hard facts).
 
ginjaninja said:
could just about stomach buying a 2011 'premium chipset/platform' at 'the end of line' if 8 cores were announced on it, but at the moment this is wishful thinking?

is there anything known about the underlying chipset 'bandwidth/performance' to imply whether current (2011) or upcoming (new 2011, 1150) desktop chip sets could accommodate 8 cores and not be like ' a 3000cc engine into a mini'. ie give an indication on likelyhood/possibility (in absence of hard facts).
Click to expand...

There is no obvious move in this game. Intel couldn't sell me a new chip if they tried their hardest. They cannot justify an upgrade for me what so ever.

Shame, as I really want to upgrade, but it isn't clear what to get. Even if I had all the money in the world (which I don't, I only have half) I couldn't make a wise purchase. So I'm not.
 
ginjaninja said:
is there anything known about the underlying chipset 'bandwidth/performance' to imply whether current (2011) or upcoming (new 2011, 1150) desktop chip sets could accommodate 8 cores...
Click to expand...

Quad channel ram is impressive in terms of memory bandwidth. More importantly, the large numbers of eight core xeon chips for single and multiprocessor boards suggest Intel think eight cores in 2011 is fine. I believe (but am having trouble chasing down benchmarks) that anything over four cores will run out of memory bandwidth on 2011 if you hit the ram subsystem hard enough (computational fluid dynamics can do this, games cant). That has been true of computers for quite a long time though.


There's an eight core, 2ghz chip for about £800 or approx 3ghz for £1600 - both completely locked down. There just isn't a cheap (relative to xeon), gaming eight core available and I suspect there won't be for a while yet - gamers are fairly content with the fast six core chip already, so a fast eight core chip would tend to take customers away from xeon workstations.

It's tempting to wait and see what IB-E brings at the moment.
 
JonJ678 said:
I believe (but am having trouble chasing down benchmarks) that anything over four cores will run out of memory bandwidth on 2011 if you hit the ram subsystem hard enough (computational fluid dynamics can do this, games cant). That has been true of computers for quite a long time though.
Click to expand...

Are you sure about this? I haven't seen any X79 tests on ram channel bottlenecks but I remember seeing them done on X58 and that showed that quads were fine on dual channel even when overclocked and it was only maxed out hex cores that bottlenecked and actually required tri-channel. I would have expected the 8 core SB-E would have been perfectly fine with quad channel /shrug.
 
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Am I right in thinking that Broadwell will use the same socket as Haswell? Have the upgrade itch, but would wait til June/July if it meant I could get another year or two out of the same mobo.
 
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