Results: Performance Teaser, Per-Clock Perf And Threaded Apps
Per-Clock Performance
First, let's take a look at how Haswell fares against Ivy and Sandy Bridge at a constant 3.5 GHz, with power-saving features and Turbo Boost disabled.
At least in our single-threaded LAME conversion test, Haswell is just over 3% faster than Ivy Bridge and over 5% faster than Sandy Bridge.
Threaded Performance
How about when we turn on all of the chip’s features, and let the Core i7-4770K stand up against Ivy Bridge, Sandy Bridge, and Sandy Bridge-E?
In Blender 2.64, the quad-core Haswell-based part is more than 7% quicker than Core i7-3770K and 14% faster than Core i7-2700K. At the same time, a stock Core i7-3970X is still more than 23% faster than Core i7-4770K. If you were hoping that Haswell would offer an inexpensive quad-core substitute for what will be the two-generation-old Sandy Bridge-E architecture, it’d appear that the six-core design will continue to make sense for anyone with a true workstation.
Our Visual Studio-based Chrome compile benchmark would seem to concur. Think the -3770K and -2700K seem too close together? That’s what I thought at first, until I looked back to this image from our Core i7-3770K launch and saw the same thing. In comparison, Haswell has a huge impact in performance, pretty much cutting the gap between Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge-E in half. The six-core chip still reigns supreme in workstation-oriented tasks, but the Core i7-4770K’s >13% advantage over -3770K is stellar.
