Next-Gen Intel Chip Brings Big Gains For Floating-Point Apps 176
An anonymous reader writes "Tom's Hardware has published a lengthy article and a set of benchmarks on the new "Haswell" CPUs from Intel. It's just a performance preview, but it isn't just more of the same. While it's got the expected 10-15% faster for the same clock speed for integer applications, floating point applications are almost twice as a fast which might be important for digital imaging applications and scientific computing."
The serious performance increase has a few caveats: you have to use either AVX2 or FMA3, and then only in code that takes advantage of vectorization. Floating point operations using AVX or plain old SSE3 see more modest increases in performance (in line with integer performance increases).
Re:Hope it's going in the new Mac Pro (Score:5, Insightful)
Do you really need a Mac for that? If not, it seems you're limiting your potential by having to wait for the holy artifacts to be released.
Re:Might be important, but probably not... (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Would that improve hashing speeds in, say, Bitc (Score:3, Insightful)
Would that improve hashing speeds in, say, Bitcoin?
Bitcoin is based on SHA256 hashing, which has zero floating point operations. So no, this will not impact Bitcoin mining at all.
Re:Hope it's going in the new Mac Pro (Score:4, Insightful)
Erm -- ECC memory is slower than non-ECC memory, I think.
Re:Poor AMD (Score:5, Insightful)