Intel's Haswell-E Desktop CPU Debuts With Eight Cores, DDR4 Memory

crookedvulture writes: Intel has updated its high-end desktop platform with a new CPU-and-chipset combo. The Haswell-E processor has up to eight cores, 20MB of cache, and 40 lanes of PCI Express 3.0. It also sports a quad-channel memory controller primed for next-gen DDR4 modules. The companion X99 chipset adds a boatload of I/O, including 10 SATA ports, native USB 3.0 support, and provisions for M.2 and SATA Express storage devices. Thanks to the extra CPU cores, performance is much improved in multithreaded applications. Legacy comparisons, which include dozens of CPUs dating back to 2011, provide some interesting context for just how fast the new Core i7-5960X really is. Intel had to dial back the chip's clock speeds to accommodate the extra cores, though, and that concession can translate to slower gaming performance than Haswell CPUs with fewer, faster cores. Haswell-E looks like a clear win for applications that can exploit its prodigious CPU horsepower and I/O bandwidth, but it's clearly not the best CPU for everything. Reviews also available from Hot Hardware, PC Perspective, AnandTech, Tom's Hardware, and HardOCP.

Re:*drool*

[Bob the Super Hamste]

We have probably passed the point where for most applications more speed, memory, cores, etc does anything for users but I welcome the latest and greatest. I don't do much gaming and that which I do is mostly old games that would run fine on an old Pentium 166 MMX. There are other resource intensive computations for which this is useful. My personal example is I do some amateur cartography and GIS stuff and to do what I wanted with my last machine (Athalon 64 x2) was painful and sometimes would take days to complete a single operation, mostly due to being stuck at 4GB of physical RAM. That machine got replaced by an i7 3770k with 32GB ram and what use to take almost a week could be done in about 10 minutes. Now granted a use case like this is rare but there are probably others like it, but not everyone is doing dick measuring based off of frames per second.

Re:Broadwell

[zlives]

if you can wait then you should always wait for new tech

Elephant in the room

[cowwoc2001]

No one is talking about the elephant in the room: RAM prices are so high that you'd have to spend $700 to hit 64GB RAM (the max the board supports). That is just outrageous.

These prices are going to lead to a severe drop in demand.

Re:DDR2/3/4

[mr_mischief]

CAS latency hasn't been measured directly in nanoseconds for some time now. It is now measured in clock cycles. The shorter your clock cycles (the higher your frequency) the shorter in absolute time your CAS latency is for the same number. CAS 10 at 2133 is about the same as CAS 5 on 1066.

CAS latency on Wikipedia [wikipedia.org]
Memory timing on Hardware Secrets [hardwaresecrets.com]
FAQ on RAM timings from Kingston [kingston.com]

Re:DDR2/3/4

[danbob999]

DDR is not about the number of channels. You could design a system with 8 channels DDR1 or single channel DDR4 if you want to. New generation DDR RAM is always about lower voltage and higher clock speed. Usually at the cost of higher latency (800 MHz DDR3 is a bit slower than DDR2)

Re:*drool*

[mestar]

Single thread performance from core 2 duo from 2008, to the 4770 i7 from this year improved just 90%, so, not even a doubling in speed.