Next-Gen Intel Chip Brings Big Gains For Floating-Point Apps

[wraggster]

"Tom's Hardware has published a lengthy article and a set of benchmarks (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-4770k-haswell-performance,3461.html) on the new "Haswell" CPUs from Intel. It's just a performance preview, but it isn't just more of the same. While it's got the expected 10-15% faster for the same clock speed for integer applications, floating point applications are almost twice as a fast (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-4770k-haswell-performance,3461-2.html) which might be important for digital imaging applications and scientific computing."The serious performance increase has a few caveats: you have to use either AVX2 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AVX2#Advanced_Vector_Extensions_2) or FMA3 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FMA3), and then only in code that takes advantage of vectorization. Floating point operations using AVX or plain old SSE3 see more modest increases in performance (in line with integer performance increases).

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/13/03/18/1839230/next-gen-intel-chip-brings-big-gains-for-floating-point-apps