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Interesting that the article mentions SNB, because since then the gains in performance have been much smaller. SNB was the last "significant" gain in performanc
by higherpurpose 13y ago
Interesting that the article mentions SNB, because since then the gains in performance have been much smaller. SNB was the last "significant" gain in performance for Intel CPU's I'd say (+35 percent over previous generation). All of the new generations since then have gotten like 10 percent increase in IPC, at best, and Broadwell will probably get a max gain of +5 percent.
To "hide" this, Intel has refocused its marketing on power consumption, where gains seem easier to achieve (for now), as well as other pure marketing tricks such as calling what used to be "Turbo Boost speed", the "normal speed". I've noticed for example recently a Bay Trail laptop being marketed at "2 Ghz", even though Bay Trail's base speed is much lower than that.
- zwegner 13y agoDepends on the application, of course. Haswell introduced some really cool new instructions (both the Bit Manipulation set as well as the Software Transactional Memory set). Don't have any numbers off-hand, but these can definitely speed up certain workloads.
- supergauntlet 13y agoApparently in specific workloads the move from AVX -> AVX2 was very substantial, though I can't seem to find the article that showed this.
- vardump 13y agoThe transition is more like from SSE2 -> AVX2, in integer workloads. AVX2 adds 256-bit wide integer instructions and gather-instruction. Gather does multiple loads in one instruction. AVX was just about floating point.
- Guvante 13y ago> as well as other pure marketing tricks such as calling what used to be "Turbo Boost speed", the "normal speed" I always found calling it turbo boost speed odd. During the majority of applications that exist today that is the speed you will get.
- higherpurpose 13y agoThe point of Turbo Boost speed is that it's unsustainable, therefore you may only get it for short flashes of time. If it wasn't unsustainable, that would be the real speed of the chip. But they can't make these chips at 3 Ghz, and also claim 10W of power consumption. By using Turbo Boost, they have their cake and eat it, too. They can do well in benchmarks thanks to Turbo-Boost, but also do well in power consumption tests, because most of the time the chip will not be running at Turbo Boost speed, and will be throttled to "normal speed" as soon as it passes its power consumption limit. So Intel is being misleading by using Turbo Boost speed as the normal speed.
- Guvante 13y agoAh, I assumed the Turbo Boost was just due to the fact that if you are using all four cores you can't clock yourself quite as high.