Apart from the increased overall CPU performance and GPU performance gains what are the main features that Haswell will bring over Ivy/Sandy? I'm thinking of upgrading to Ivy now as the main gains of Haswell appear to be the GPU performance rather than CPU, but are there any features that are unique to Haswell that I should maybe wait for? iKiX
Other than a bit of a speed boost, the main thing that'd drive me towards an upgrade would be the 6x 6Gb/s intel sata ports. The ASmedia & Marvell controllers really aren't good enough for most SSD uses (& are slower even for specific ones) so, as SSD prices keep on falling, the ability to keep previous SSDs at 6Gb/s when upgrading or adding cheaper higher capacity ones at 6Gb/s would be a bonus. [NB okay, personally i don't *need* that as my additional usage would be for solely highly sequential stuff & my raid card's a much better option for that than the ASMedia or Marvell, but there's need & desire.] There's apparently also an increase from 4 to 6 USB3 ports - well, we all have thousands of USB3 devices that we want connected at the same time, yes? 'Apparently' pci's going to be killed off - though that's only an issue if you have legacy cards you still wish to use. & the only real disappointment is that there's still only 16x pcie 3.0 lanes - though i guess there's got to be a reason for consumers who don't *need* a larger no of cores to pay for Haswell-E (assuming that iB-E now either isn't happening or will be short lived). Tbh though, there's always the big unknown as to how o/cable they might be - were SB & iB a fluke in that regard or something intel might limit, either artificially or simply d.t. process changes, with Haswell...(?) Well, whilst i found it easy to get 4.8 from both a 2600K & 3770K (choosing not to push them further) - the latter did take a bit more arsing about with initially & there's certainly seemed to be more people struggling with it... So whether Haswell will actually be faster if you're aiming to o/c...?
Most people never overclock even on forums like this. Haswell will be mostly power consumption reduction and probably 10-15% on stock ivy performance upgrade. Wether we see a 6 core ivy or not at this point seems unlikely enough people who went x79 are probably hoping for it as it would be a drop in option. Intel seems content to leave there 4 core + hyper as there top mainstream chip whilst leaving all the 6 core stuff to there high end. They have so much market dominance that they can safely do this. ( and people want nvidia to dominate gpus with andriod dominating mobile, intels current chip strat is the future that awaits those markets, could say nvidia already doing it with Titan graphics card) Personally want AMD to do some miricle chip and give intel a run for its money. Lets all hope AMDs financials for q1 show positives.
The reason why their quad + HT could do that is because AMD did the same thing basically. That and there's no need for multicore for most mainstream uses beyond 4. Once 6 threads+ become a common thing.. Octo cores.
Hopefully the octo core consoles will encourage game devs to head towards multi threaded games as the standard. Once that happens it is pretty likely that intel make 6 or 8 cores the new high end standard!
