News Intel Core i7-4930K leaks ahead of launch

The latest in Intel's line of "we'll do as little as possible release" of a CPU at an extortionate price.

Still, it's not them I blame, it's AMD and their incompetent Bulldozer release that has virtually killed innovation in the sector for the last 2yrs.

£500 for a now mature technology 6 core CPU in 2013?...Get the F@#* out of here Intel.

 

never take tech advice from a sandwich

 

I was thinking of buying one of these but then when I really thought about it I have decided I am not going to bother, unless there is something within the reviews that makes me change my mind such as massive overclocking headroom.

The annoyance though about it is the cost of these chips.

 

Is it really fair to lay the blame solely with one or the other for a lack of innovation and competition? I'm sure that if AMD had the product to compete with Intel's offerings, they would release it. It's capitalism that's to blame. AMD does not have anywhere near the resources that Intel does and are at a significant disadvantage in that regard as far as their R&D is concerned.

On the other side Intel has no reason to innovate or put out a genuinely high value part due to, as you stated, a complete lack of competition. But then why would it if it can safely rest on its laurels. Having said that I don't think Intel's position is as safe as it would like as sales of their stuff isn't exactly a growing market.

 

Just updated it for a tenner or so.

 

This.

AMD have made numerous statements over the past couple of years to say that they are no longer going to compete with Intel at the high end and would just continue to knock out value parts.

And that's what they do. 8 core CPU for £120. 6 core CPU for around £90 that can duke it out with the 2500k in gaming.

TBH even if AMD were pushing then Intel would have inevitably hit the brick wall they have hit with Haswell any way. There's only so much a die shrink will yield. Now they are at a thermal brick wall because they can't solder Haswell chips (something about the size of the die).

AMD are just rebadging their old server products and selling them to a desktop market. I would hazard a guess and say that they don't care too much about said market right now as they hardly even bother to send out review sample CPUs any more.

Their money at the desktop end comes from their high value GPU parts. They've also secured many gaming companies and are working with them too.

 

Intel didn't hit a wall because process shrinks can only do so much, they hit a wall because they are focusing on improving IGP.

Between Sandy and Ivy the processors includes a pretty big boost in the IGP on top end parts in addition to reducing the TDP a lot (95 to 77) as well as SDP which Intel doesn't advertise for these, but Ivy uses a good 15-25% less power under most workloads than Sandy. It also has about an 8-10% increase in performance at the same clock speed and most chips are clocked about 100Mhz higher.

That isn't any 20-30% increase...but that is still fairly notable if you look at the whole platform. Haswell is vaguely in the same performance gain from Ivy, without dramatically changing TDP, but SDP has a pretty big gain as well and total platform power is down a lot on mobile (and it looks like it is probably improved pretty well on desktop systems too) and delivers about a 7-12% gain in performance at the same clock rates (basically same clocks on desktop, about 100-300Mhz slower on mobile though). In addition the mobile parts have 30-250% better IGP and destop has about 30-300% improved IGP (it looks like most desktop parts are HD4600 with 20EUs, most desktop parts had been HD2500 for Ivy, with only K series and one or two i3's having HD4000 IIRC, HD2500 was 6 EUs).

A lot of people don't care about Intel's IGP, especially in the desktop, but some people do.

I'd honestly be suprised if Broadwell doesn't bring pretty, pardon the pun, broad improvements in CPU performance. I can't imagine Intel has a burning desire to force down platform power a lot further on mobile as Haswell has done a remarkable job of that. IGP can always use more improvement, but I can't see Intel investing a huge amount of time on that for desktop. I doubt we'll see more than maybe a 5-10% increase in Broadwell IPC, but I'd be pretty suprised if we didn't see a 10-15% increase in clock speeds, or at least max turbos of most chips with the move to 14nm.

Top end Broadwell desktop part (non-Broadwell E of course) might well be quad core with a 3.5Ghz base clock and 4.2Ghz turbo, 70-75w TDP, slightly improved IGP and maybe 5-10% better IPC.

I guess in part I don't see the big deal. I am happy with a 10% gain every generation in CPU performance, especially if there is the occasional sneak in of a slight clock speed bump so that we are closer to a 15% gain in realizable performance per generation. Sure I'd love triple digit or high double digit gains ever generation, but meh. If we can keep pushing down power and heat a bit every generation and get at least small to modest gains in CPU and IGP performance that is good to me. Just means I don't have a pressing desire to upgrade every couple of years and can go 3-4 before I feel a need to upgrade.

 

The big push for both Intel and AMD are SOC.

More and more components once found on a MoBo are making there way into the CPU die, as this makes for a better all round processor. Think mobile, consoles, maybe one day cars, TV's, etc, etc. Sadly the days of making the highest performing (FLOPS, IPS) possessor are numbered, as the number one concern now days is lower power draw and one piece of silicon to do it all.

The fact that we still get higher performance is purely a side effect. If it wasn't for moving components into the CPU, the die size would have become to small to effectively remove the heat a long time ago.

 

Only 6 cores? Well, I'm still hoping for an 8 core consumer part.

 

There shouldn't be much expectation of progress now, one thing I'd like to see is the reduction of power draw and thermal output while maintaining similar levels of performance.

Apart from that, Intel is so far ahead of AMD now that it's just milking money off every chip.

That in turn will fund very good R&D to maintain a competitive advantage.

In short, it doesn't look good for AMD right now.

 

Unless you need heavily OC'd 6C/12T or 64GB of memory then I would definitely go Z87:

1) You can buy boards with PCIe switches that give you 32 lanes
2) 32GB of memory on LGA1150 is plenty for almost everyone, and if you're doing professional work that needs 24-7 reliability buy a TUF/workstation board. [But still, all X79 should boards also support Xeons and ECC]
3) Z87 has better features than X79. It's a bit sad there's no update to the PCH on a premium platform honestly. [to be fair, X58 got not update and let's also look at AMD's 990FX too...]
4) More Z87 board options: sizes/designs/features [but you can still buy the mATX R4G afaik]
5) Cheaper K series, plus, QuickSync or at least iGPU backup if you're between GPU upgrades.

Saying that, if you do have heart and soul set on a new X79 rig, we've got a new ROG board with ev-er-y-th-ing on it coming soon and all the new boards have Win8/UEFI fast boot support now.

 

PCie switches don't remove the bottleneck between the CPU and multiple GPUs. They only help with GPU to GPU communication.

X79/C606 as a platform has some advantages over consumer parts (Z68/77/87) and some drawbacks as well. 40 PCIe 3.0 lanes is certainly an advantage and is very useful for some of us. Quad channel ram is a nice feature too and can help this old platform outperform Z87 in some situations.

X79/C606 is not for everybody, but for some people's particular usage models it is a much better option than Z87.

 

AMD's had them out for quite some time now. Depending on how you count cores, I suppose.

Then again, do you have an honest use for 8, or is it more a matter of extending your e-peen by 1/3? If you need lots of cores, get proper server parts - they go up to 12 cores in the * Bridge-EP series. Get a multi-socket board, and you can get up to 48 cores.

Much as Intel likes to segment and milk markets, they're probably quite right that there isn't really a need for true 8-core consumer parts. Plus they likely couldn't cram that many cores into the power envelopes they stick to now.

Interestingly, though, there will apparently be a 25W Haswell-EP part - quad-core at 1.8GHz