Haswell - WHY? Help me understand.

[enewmen]

Hi all.

Please explain a little about Haswell to me. I'm not complaining or bashing anything.

Integrated voltage regulator:
The Motherboards and notebooks don't look any different. Is this such a minor advancement?

Active Idle - 20x less power consumption. Not in desktops. How does this help large data centers and farms if the idle power is about the same as Ivy Bridge? I also didn't see a link about Active Idle specifically in notebooks.

Ultrabooks. Haswell should make them slimmer, faster, cheaper. I still never saw an Ultrabook with HD5000 graphics at NewEgg. The prices are as high as ever. The only thing to make them slimmer is a minor upgrade from 2.5" or mSATA to M.2 (NGFF). The 4650U has HD5000 using only 11-15 watts.

Double the floating point and AVX2 (integer and floating) performance. Not noticeable now, but what kinds of applications can take advantage of this? Even Handbrake doesn't show any real difference (just 10%).

"New advanced power-saving system" "A new cache design" "Support for Thunderbolt technology.[33]" Where is this??
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Haswell_(microarchitecture)

Personally I'll get a Haswell as soon as the C2 chipsets come out to replace my aging Q6600.

What am I missing?
thanks!

 

[hizodge]

Haswell has some new C states which reduce idle power consumption.

The actual CPU performance has been improved by about 10% from Ivy Bridge as you said, but the integrated graphics have received a noticeable boost, can't remember the numbers but it was something like 30-50% from Intel HD 4000.

New improved memory controller for higher frequency memory at greatly lower voltages.

Not sure if this answers your question.

 

[enewmen]

Thanks for the post. But a lot still doesn't make sense.

Are the new C states for Idle power or Sleep power? (I thought they are only for sleep). Haswell does seem to have lower idle power than Ivy, but not nearly as improved as I thought.

I know about the integrated graphics and it sucks a lot less. But like I said, I didn't see this in any Ultrabooks yet. This is where the integrated graphics will show the most benefit if you want a lightweight gaming machine.

New memory controller for higher frequency memory? Does this mean it can use RAM rated at very low volts? I thought the RAM (at any volt) still at 1600 Mhz (the CPU can't use much more). Can the Intel IGP benefit high memory speeds like the AMD APUs do? Maybe we can see super fast/ super low volt RAM used in Skylake (2016) for the purpose of speeding up the IGP.

The TDP sucks. It seems high even when the IGP isn't being used. Any reason for this?

Thanks again! and sorry for any dumb questions.