Sunday, June 02, 2013

Intel Haswell Peformance -- LOL Anand is such an Intel pumper boy

Anand at AnandTech.com just published a review of Intel's Haswell CPUs. He started by worshiping Intel Haswell with words like "the most amazing thing",  "the single largest improvement",  "completely redefines the expectations", "the epitome of polish and evolution".

Then it comes with the his benchmark numbers. When operating with load, the Haswell i7-4770K(3.5GHz) consumes 113.2 watts, while the older i7-3770K (3.5GHz) consumes 101.1 watts.

Anand obviously noted that the Haswell consumes 11.968% ~ 12% more power than the Ivy Bridge (well Anand's number was 11.8%, I guess he might have run into one of those FDIV errors, but this minor error does not affect our general conclusion and we should not hold anyone liable). But Anand was quick to direct our attention to the very fact that Haswell i7-4770K is 13% faster than the previous generation.

So, Haswell is 13% faster but consumes 12% more electricity. What about performance-per-watt improvement?

PPW = performance/heat

PPW1/PPW2 = p1/h1 / (p2/h2) = p1/p2 * h2/h1 = 1.13/ 1.12   = 1.0089 = 100.89%.

In other words, Haswell's performance-per-watt is only 0.9% better than Ivy Bridge. Folks, that's less than 1%.

 Moreover, 0.89% is definitely within the margin of error and sample deviations, and it is safe to conclude that Haswell is no better than Ivy Bridge in terms of performance per watt.

Anand, though probably not a Ph.D.,  is certainly an intelligent person. So, the question is, why was Anand so high on so small an improvement?? Where did all those hyper words come from?