Should I buy Haswell E, wait for Broadwell E or wait for AMD Zen?

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Ecky
Even if Zen is ~40% faster than Carrizo, as AMD has suggested in their PR releases, it's still going to be slower than Haswell, much less Broadwell or Skylake. I'd say it's realistic for Zen to be somewhere between Sandy Bridge and Haswell in single-threaded performance per clock; the big unknown factors here are how many cores you'll be able to get, what clockspeed, and at what price. If you can get 8 Zen cores for the price of 6 Haswell cores (or less), it might be worth it - you'll have worse single-threaded performance, but better multi-threaded performance.

In short, Zen is likely to be much like Piledriver vs Ivy Bridge - slower cores, more cores, competing on price but not on absolute performance. It might not matter as much...
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DonkeyOatie

DonkeyOatie

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Sep 16, 2014
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For the first part of your question, Broadwell-E is about three months away. I would (am) wait for it, unless I needed a system next month.

Zen is a lot further away. Can you wait that long? I don't see it better than Broadwell-E. although it's price/performance may be similar.

Most importantly, what are you going to use the system for?
 
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Ecky

Ecky

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Feb 3, 2013
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Even if Zen is ~40% faster than Carrizo, as AMD has suggested in their PR releases, it's still going to be slower than Haswell, much less Broadwell or Skylake. I'd say it's realistic for Zen to be somewhere between Sandy Bridge and Haswell in single-threaded performance per clock; the big unknown factors here are how many cores you'll be able to get, what clockspeed, and at what price. If you can get 8 Zen cores for the price of 6 Haswell cores (or less), it might be worth it - you'll have worse single-threaded performance, but better multi-threaded performance.

In short, Zen is likely to be much like Piledriver vs Ivy Bridge - slower cores, more cores, competing on price but not on absolute performance. It might not matter as much that the cores are slower though, since the growth of software performance needs has slowed down in recent years.

Since AMD is in dire financial straights, don't expect them to give you great performance for nothing. In all likelihood you'll pay about the same money for about the same performance as Intel's equivalents.
 
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