No, they aren't better binned. Another site looked at the voltage vs. freq curve and found that the std TDP, S, and T parts all followed the same curve. That i7 S part looks like an oddball.
I work with HP Elitedesk 800's all the time with I5-4570S CPU's. They're incredibly small and quiet, much more so than the identically sized USFF dc7900 Core 2 Duo's they replaced.
We constantly hear about how aggressively Intel bins parts, how each model is a special snowflake that's exactly optimized for its role, etc etc. I've yet to see any evidence that this is actually true (as opposed to "Intel engages in very aggressive market segmentation --- by product name".
The primary reason I'm not convinced is that no-one else bins nearly as aggressively. Apple, never a company to miss the opportunity for a dollar, doesn't engage in some obvious binning (eg ship the iPhone6+ at 100MHz faster; or even give you a 100MHz speed boost in each model as you go from 16GB to 32GB to 64GB storage). Qualcomm offers a fairly limited palette of Snapdragon speeds. Samsung, the master if there ever was one, at slicing and dicing phone models, doesn't offer the same phone at speeds of 1, 1.5, and 2GHz; etc etc.
We have to assume that - everyone else's processes are crazy uniform compared to Intel OR - Intel is MUCH smarter than anyone in how they are able to bin OR - binning (at the micro segmentation Intel offers) just is not a real thing and the third option seems the most plausible to me.
Almost nobody pays attention to GHz numbers in mobile devices. Nobody really cares. And the scaling with ARM really means nothing. Apple consistently has among the highest performance ARM CPU's yet they're lower clocked and lower core count than everyone else. Binning ARM CPU's would require two things in order to be profitable: real-world benefits to a slightly higher clock speed, and marketing the higher clock speed as worth the premium. Currently there are neither. I'd guess 99/100 people don't even know the clock speed of the phone they own, because that's how irrelevant it is. For many applications (such as gaming, where performance is not consistent across the majority of devices) the GPU matters more than the CPU because of how heavily optimized these apps are for the GPU.
The PC landscape is totally different.. You still have PC's sold that have 1/10th the performance of a Core i7.
Now, where your idea could be interesting is if they sell an "eco" chip that runs at a lower voltage due to binning. People MIGHT be willing to pay extra for a phone with +20% battery life.
Or perhaps the simplest and most obvious explanation - Apple feels they're more in the console game than the PC game. Offer one consistent level of performance across all iPhones of the same generation and that's the spec all developers need to relate to.
So Intel chips can't be overclocked and produce more watts than different lettered processors under identical conditions? That isn't what was tested and would be a rather shocking development.
Chips take a considerable time to fab. Markets change fast and somehow Intel manages to produce what the market needs in the face on negligible competition? Yea, I really believe that they are really binning and not simply segementing to what marketing wants.
Use case. A PC's use case is an entirely different world than mobile phones. Your anti-Apple bias aside, what applications would users engage in on their smart phone where CPU performance could be noticeably segregated by clock speed. In this space. The only indication of CPU performance is the "snapiness" of the response from whatever app you are in.
In a PC sense, I could launch an application or task that takes minutes, hours, etc.. 200-300 MHz would be noticeable over the course of an hour of video compression.
I used to work on SoCs in process nodes down to 28 nm, and the variation from the fast/fast (low-delay, leaky) to the slow/slow (high-delay, low-leakage) corners in modern processes is substantial. The fact that a given vendor isn't binning simply means that they're adding a fair bit of margin.
For that matter I wouldn't be so sure that Apple doesn't bin. For example it's possible that the A7s in iPhone 5s and iPad Air were binned differently.
Finally, Intel's volumes create additional binning opportunities. A process condition that happens, say, 0.1% of time time would constitute such as small volume as to be useless to most vendors but adds up to a nice niche for Intel.
I think its reasonable to believe they are binned. From a business perspective, is it really necessary to have THAT many different CPU models that Intel has? At some point you can have too many products and theyre competing with each other. Look at GM and how they had too many brands and rebadged vehicles that are competing with each other. I dont think there IS any business advantage to artificially create as many different chip models as intel has, though there is a business advantage to being able to salvage chips they would otherwise have to toss.
When comparing to ARM processors, those are less complex and less expensive. If they have an ARM chip that tests bad, it may make more sense to toss it then to cripple it and sell it as a lower model. Also like consoles there is a preference to have the same speed across all devices, where as with a PC, different CPU speeds seem more acceptable to the market.
The 65W parts seemed to show increased performance in IGP gaming versus their non-S counterparts. 4790S vs 4790. I would suspect the TDP budget for the IGP is unaffected by the TDP reduction and therefore might get a little thermal room to run harder. Looking at Intel ARK the 4790 series all runs at 350 base and 1.2 max; the 4790K is able to boost higher to 1.25GHz. The IGP gaming number seem to tell this story.
You can also see when a discrete GPU is thrown in there the non-S parts then perform above the S parts in gaming.
For IGP gaming AMD is still the best choice; and that is about all they're good for.
This is the story in thermally-limited situations like the Surface Pro 3. The i5 model is faster at games than the i7 simply because the i5's CPU uses less of the thermal budget so the iGPU can stay faster for longer. In a more extreme case, running old non-CPU bound games (World of Warcraft), the i3 model is even better - the CPU leaves even more room for the iGPU.
Of course, this could all be avoided by the game simply going "hmm, which one is really slowing me down - the CPU loop or the GPU loop?" and then throttling one to match, but the odds of that happening any time soon are pretty poor.
No. The regular Intel 22 nm CPUs are so good that they can run ~4.0 GHz at ~1.0 V, whereas stock gives them almost 1.2 V at the top turbo bin. So cutting down on power consumption hardly requires any effort.
Eventually wear and leakage will cause tapering. The long-term reliability is Intel's goal which is why these chips are so conservatively clocked. I've already read reports of people running Haswell at 1.3V that initially had them stable at 4.6+GHz and a year later, can't crack 4.2GHz at 1.2V.
Keeping these things around 1.0V is key to their service life. As Spadge said, try to get the most you can out of the stock voltage (usually 4GHz, sometimes more.)
Completely off topic, but you guys do an article on AMD's new "Omega" driver? It has loads of new features and i can't find anywhere that's done a proper in-depth article on it.
That would directed at Ryan Smith and maybe jarred Walton for the mobile side of the equation. I suspect that the mobile side is unaffected at the moment.
The only card that is well supported by all the new features in Omega is the R9 285 (Tonga). The R9 290 and 290X make a decent showing but are missing the 4K virtual resolution support.
Based on some other reviews, I was starting to think Anandtech had switched back to separate power consumption idle and load numbers, but here we go again. Please stop. The audience here is enthusiasts and enthusiasts want the complete picture.
I agree, if I have a server that is idle most of it's life, I want to know how many watts it is drawing at idle. On the other hand, if it is running 100% 24/7 then I want to see if a higher TDP, better performing CPU will be cost effective over a cheaper lower TDP part that might run a task longer.
Captain Obvious tells us all, that Intel has a very weak competition on the x86 CPU front in all the recent years (I would say, right from the launch of Sandy Bridge LGA1155 almost 4 years ago). So, they make big money "for free" (in a sense that it's an easy money for them) all these years and don't have to bother about such peculiarities as better perf/watt...
This feels like almost a completely wasted review, a sort of Seinfeld review; a review about nothing. Most things you can surmise about these S chips as many things scale linearly so it would have been good to have seen a much better focus on power consumption. The unanswered question is whether these chips use different voltages than the stock chips and also a lack of hard power data; the delta data is not enough. Also what did you use to load the cores? It says AVX but what application and is AVX a good example to use as how many applications use it? I’d like to have seen a focus on different CPU loads to determine the different characteristics of these S chips; INT, FP, AVX. So rather than the multitude of redundant data that can deduced from scaling of frequency why not something focused and new! What a wasted opportunity and a poorly thought out review.
Intel announced the Intel IoT Platform, a reference model end-to-end designed to unify ans simplify connectivity and security for the Internet of Things. http://bit.ly/1yCMSnB
Look at the partners. Looks more like a enterprise software "solution" to acquire/store/extract data from than actual hardware or anything of interest to normal folks. As long as Intel's HW story in that space is Quark, forget it...
Right on spot, I use a 4570S in my Linux home server. But as an enthusiast I did some bclk(couldn't resist it) to 106.4 so that it Turbo:s to 3.83GHz and multithreadsx4 to 3.4GHz ;-) Anyway, it feels very fast running Linux. I couldn't have used a K-processor as I wouldn't be able to resist maximum clock it, no power saving server ...
Gaming is done on a 4.8GHz 2600K, it doesn't look like a need to replace it anytime soon. Unless Skylake surprises us all.
Nice job informing about those lower power cpus, saves us time from undervolting and just draws less power from day one.
> lower power cpus, saves us time from undervolting and just draws less power from day one.
That's not the same. Low power CPUs limit your clock sped when you need it most, i.e. under full load. Whereas undervolting delivers full performance, or in TDP limited cases even higher performance. It does cut into the OC headroom, though.
I expressed it badly, sorry. The point is as these cpus are TDP-limited you know how much they will draw the most, and can design cooling/case etc. based on that, and in "99%" of home user cases you don't need the extra performance of 4xfull load+OC without restraints - the cpu is fast during "normal" use. Even gaming. It's not the best buy for a pure rendering box or similar though ...
It would be nice to see what the idle power consumption is with like setups on some of the processors. In addition it is a shame that you have dV for power consumption for the Pentium models...but there are NO performance benchmarks for them. Both of the Haswell pentiums have roughly the same power consumption of the i3-4130t, but no idea what they actually can put up in terms of performance. Also rather suprised that the older Ivy Bridge i3 has such low power consumption, but seems to average slightly better than the i3-4130t.
Too bad no test of the 4MB cache and higher clocked Hasy i3-ts. That would have been interesting, as that is almost exactly what I am thinking of replacing my G1610 server with. Though realistically by the time I get around to it, I'll probably be looking at a Broadwell based server.
A lot of the 35 watt i3 CPU's are not available for sale anywhere. Especially the Haswell with the 4 meg cache and the 4600 graphics. One question I would pose is cant you just buy a regular i3 and just underclock it to use less power?
Yes. XBitLabs tested exactly that and the result is the same as the S/T models. The automatic voltage-frequency scaling of Turbo does all the magic behind the scenes (i.e. lowers the voltage when you lower the clock).
Ian, man - seriously you need to stop these retarded Delta charts! They are useless! To make these even worse is that you are testing low wattage cpus. the people interested in such cpus are usually interested in idle and load numbers separately. what you have has no reference point to workout either the idle or load numbers.
quit with these useless charts. there are many who have agreed to this.
I like the review, but I agree with this. I think readers would understand that their individual results are going to be different because they won't be running identical configurations, but we can do the simple subtraction ourselves if we want to see the difference in load versus idle. I'd much prefer getting the total system wattage at idle and load from a review. It seems more useful to me to see those raw numbers actually posted.
Can we also move away from having a GPU in the system for tested idle and load power consumption? It is one more source of bluring on what is actually using the power. Everything on the chart has an iGPU and in most cases businesses or low power users are going to be leaning on the iGPU, not a dGPU. So seeing what system power consumption is without a dGPU is important, even if all systems have the same contribution from an identical dGPU (it means a lot more if the dGPU is contributing 10w at idle...so suddenly you have a 3w difference between processor models...but the idle is 10w for one and 13w for another, instead of 20w and 23w).
Delta charts are more accurate, and easier to generate, than absolute numbers. An absolute number will either be "total system power" or "total system power minus an estimate of non-processor power". The first is useless as information about the processor, because it isn't comparable across platforms, and the second is only an estimate unless hardware mods are done for power taps. For a chart that has such a large number of processors on it, the estimation errors for calculating discrete draw would likely put the chips in the wrong order.
For people who are using the onboard graphics, a 1250 power supply, even one that is Gold rated, is going to be pretty inefficient at low power.
I know it is nice/convenient to have a single common setup for testing both with and without graphics and it makes things "apples-to-apples" but it doesn't match how I would build a system. If I really only intend to use the onboard graphics, I would try to pick a power supply that was sized appropriately.
For users trying to understand the platform/cpu idle and load power, it seems like it would be beneficial to have both idle and load power reported AND appropriately sized power supply for the test conditions.
> If I really only intend to use the onboard graphics, I would try to pick a power supply that was sized appropriately.
Good luck with that. There're almost no appropriately sized PSUs for such systems available on the market; seems like they're all exclusively designed for and sold to big OEMs.
Not really. The idle power of the CPU very well might be different between the different CPUs combined (which can be sussed out if they all use the same hardware configuration excepting the CPU). Idle to load might only be a 10w difference for one CPU...but it might idle using 20w for the CPU. Another CPU might be a 15w difference from idle to load, but it might idle at 5w...making it a much more power efficient CPU overall.
http://download.intel.com/support/processors/corei... It must be because intel is not selling the CPU's in boxed retail set. 4360T, 4350T, 4330T, 4160T, 4150T, 3250T are not available boxed, but are valid parts. My guess is you have to order them as tray and are only available to OEM's. However, they may be available through a small OEM custom computer builder shop.
I have been using the i7-4790S for the past 4 months and there is something very strange about the results. The cinebench multithreaded bench is way too high. This cpu turbos to 3.6GHz with 4 cores so it can not possibly have the same score as a non-S that turbos to 3.8 GHz with 4 cores. Also my own average results are 160 for single and 740 for multi (HT enabled of course). Maybe there is something wrong with my setup but it doesn't feel slow in any way. It was very difficult to get hold of but it made sense because i want a very quiet computer even at load.
I am happy to see these CPUs doing so well for the price. I used the i5 S for a whitebox esxi server build and I couldn't be happier. I ended up building 2 as a way to get to VSAN in my home. the low power consumption works when you are planning to leave the server running for long periods of time. Rock solid processor.
As somebody with a stock 4790K I have completely no idea just *what* exactly is the point of these new chips. It doesn't save any power over regular Haswells with regular consumer workloads when cores simply idle while sacrificing significant performance for insignificant power savings for heavy CPU loads.
That's interesting, the numbers tell exactly the opposite and many people would argue the other way round that the little bit extra in performance for special cases (SLI setups, HPC, ...) is not worth the additional energy use at idle and load and even less the additional noise for the more capable cooling system.
They all use the same power at idle. The lower TDP processors make it safe to use a weaker fan or put them somewhere with worse airflow, even in the worst case when something does load the CPU for an extended duration.
This and the xbitlabs article someone else linked show that the low-power variants behave the same as the regular versions, except for throttling down out of turbo sooner or farther under extended load. They are NOT more energy efficient, either in the CPU or the IGP.
HPC is the use-case where these lower TDP chips are exactly the opposite of what you want, unless you're really constrained by cooling, or your workload is actually constrained by memory latency but your CPUs are ramping up to max speed anyway.
It does indeed save power, and the review shows exactly that. That is in fact the entire point. 84W may be too high for some scenarios, so there is a demand for CPUs with lower TDP. The Lenovo Outlet has several such PCs for sale at this very moment, that aren't much bigger than my unmanaged switch. I doubt an i7-4790K could be quietly cooled in such a small enclosure.
1. I agree with the others. Please include separate idle & load power consumption. Include delta if you want *in addition* to not instead of.
2. Why on Earth would you attempt to review low-power CPU's on a 1250w PSU? This is a large part of the reason why there's only a 2w apparent difference between a 35w "T" and a 53w regular Pentium / i3 - at sub 5% loads the "+90% efficiency at 20-80% load" curve rapidly falls away to as low as 70%, even 60% on some PSU's. It can also add up to 20w to idle consumption which defeats the whole point of a low powered chip. The 35w "T" chips in particular are often used in slim TDP limited cases like the Akasa Euler (typically fed from an external 80-160w "brick" Pico-PSU / SFX PSU's or at most 360-400w Gold ATX (where a 70-80w load would be within the 20-80% load "90% efficiency sweet spot" of Gold PSU's)).
3. Idle to load delta power consumption (with no actual idle / load figures) is even worse than "delta only temps" and results in totally useless figures up to 20w out of whack for intended market (thin Mini-ITX) when it comes from a <5% load on a 1250w PSU that no-one would use on such chips. Again - PLEASE just show idle & load watts / temps in future.
4. The i3-4130T has been replaced (at same price) by the i3-4160T which is 200Mhz faster.
5. Is the Haswell +0.1v auto-overvolt on AVX Prime power virus load test really suitable for load testing on low-power CPU's which more than likely won't be fully loaded (or running constant load AVX apps)?
I can kind of understand the PSU wattage. The same PSU has to be used across a lot of different system configurations ranging from very low demand hardware to extremely powerful, multi-GPU builds otherwise the results across the entire range become incomparable and possibly less valuable to readers. Then again, it has been a frequently mentioned sticky point for readers. Maybe branching out to a couple of PSUs that are of slightly more suitable wattage for their application would be useful. I think a lot of Anandtech readers, while very interested in tech reviews, aren't always looking for the very fastest and most powerful hardware available. The site does a really good job catering to that audience (I think so anyhow since sort of consider myself one of those kinds of readers who wants elegant, practical computing solutions instead of the biggest/fastest at any cost) with the exception of the PSU sizing problem you mentioned and the lack of absolute consumption numbers. But still, go easy on them. They have a lot of work to keep them busy and a lot of feedback to consider that might sometimes get conflicted between reader opinions.
The moderate binning should not require different CPUs. It would be nice if Intel simply used the already established tool of cTDP to offer users a choice. Run normally during winter and switch to power reduced mode in summer, or when a long video transcode is needed. Provide a simple app or windows switch for this. The Win Vista/7 gadgets would be ideal for this. Oh, and this software could be used on notebooks & tablets too, where it would be far more useful.
One of the really interesting aspects of the i3-4130T processors is that they work on workstation motherboards with ECC memory (unlike the i5 and i7). Perfect for building a NAS instead of using the low power Xeons. When buying an i3, make sure whether you'll be getting one with or without integrated GPU.
I recently built a system with a an i5-4690s. I still used a decent cooler (Scythe Big Shuriken 2). Why the lower TDP part? It is for my workshop. It gets hot in there and it is a machine that I want working reliably for a very long time. The S processor was an obvious choice. I ended up still less than 45degrees above ambient running IntelBurnTest. Very nice. Dust filtering is provided by an automotive 'pod' filter. Just thought it worth mentioning since it is a use case that is not quite the same as those mentioned at the end of the (interesting thanks) review.
Here we have a review of low power CPUs, and there's pretty much no analysis on the actual power usage. There's one delta test that shows the supposedly low power CPU drawing way more power than it should, with no follow up tests. What I want to know is, how much power do I actually save with these chips.
I don't want to play the devil's advocate, but... Do you seriously think xbitlabs's review is a real one? They wrote 8 pages about low TDP processors (where the "T" stands for thermal) and they didn't bother to check the temperatures. Nor noise, for that matter, and considering that these processors are an obvious candidate for mini ITX systems, where both temperature and noise are an issue, I wouldn't say it is a real review. Ok, noise might be less important, but holy crap, these CPUs have a lower thermal design and you don't even have a look at temperatures? And no, checking the power is not enough. The relationship between power and temperature is not so linear. But I have to say they did a very good job by checking the voltage, revealing that these CPU's aren't binned. Which is surprising, in my opinion, as it contradicts both this review and common sense.
Anyway I have to agree with you that AT's review is also disappointing. Apart from the choice of a huge PSU, whose motivation (uniformity across all tests) does at least make sense - and anyway I am interested in the difference between processors, not so much in absolute values, so it isn't too bad - they have taken a performance-centric approach. Checking the performance is ok, but then you also have to check power and temperatures (ok, I'll leave noise aside), and they didn't do too much about this either. They have only one graph about temperatures. I am really surprised to see that the i7 4790s (65W) is 7° hotter than the the 4770k (84W), and there isn't a single word about this. They just say that the power consumption is also higher, and it might be "a bit alarming". Well, I'd say it is more than a bit alarming: the CPU is clearly slower, and then it consumes more and gets hotter??? Maybe Intel is binning CPUs after all, it's just the other way around: for S models they choose the crappiest ones! :-D Seriously, that demands further investigation. As things look right now, buying an S model wouldn't make sense.
In the end, both reviews leave my question unanswered: is it a good idea to choose an S model for a mini-ITX system to keep temperatures down? I think I will have to use pcpartpicker and some forums to figure out. But it is a very long, slow and painful research, and I wish I could have spared it.
I'd say that comparison between xbitlab and anandtech's reviews is entirely valid given that Anandtech's review is more like an empty shell of a partial review whereas xbitlabs actually digs down into the chips and analyzes them. We're in agreement that more attention wasn't paid to the power, temperature, noise aspect in either review though. I'm not sure what happened but those three metrics used to be standard, and now it's like we're lucky to even get them and when we do they're often half-assed.
Take a look at Anandtech's review here and you'll notice more than half of the words in it are dedicated to explaining what the benchmark programs are good for testing. Take those useless paragraphs out and you're left with piratically nothing: a tiny bit of analysis and a smattering of charts. This is one of the laziest writeups i can recall seeing on this site. It provides almost no insight and sheds almost no light on the items it's analyzing.
Anandtech used to be the gold standard in tech analysis, and now they're no longer even the first site i visit when an embargo lifts on a highly anticipated recently released piece of tech. Being the best was their crown to lose, and i'm afraid they've lost it. This "review" is just another nail in the coffin.
Finally someone cares about nature and my ears, results are better than i expected, im using those S and T procesors for last 4 years and im completely happy with them. Even todays low power Xeons are great.
I have been using a i7-4770S for 8 months and its really fast enough while not drawing too much power (I still get it over 80W, if I use Prime95). Very important to me to limit the power, since mine runs on battery.
What I dont like however is that the T and S are also not soldered to the heatspreader. That means they get far too hot for small coolers. I had to delid mine and use liquid metal paste between heatspreader and die. I got 20°C less through that. Now the small cooler can run much more silent and I still only get 65°C max. On top of that, since it runs much cooler, it also draws about 5 to 10 Watts less, depending on what it does.
I'm actually looking at an HP all in one (for a kitchen computer) that has an S series CPU, and was wondering what the heck it was.
35 watts for a dual core Haswell @ at least 2.9GHz is actually really impressive when you think about it. I still can't help but compare everything to my 125-watt single core 3.4GHz Prescott from ten years ago. That's a ton more performance crammed in to about 1/4 the power :) Also seems like the 35 watt parts are basically like the normal mobile parts are (before low end systems switched from 35 and 45 watt cpus to 15-19 watt ULV CPUs practically across the board)
can you please run the benchmarks again for the xeons with HT disabled? i want to see how the 65Watts 12 cores compares to the 6 cores i7 with hyperthreading disabled on the 12 cores one.
that is 12 cores xeon at 1.8 ht disabled versus 6 cores at 3.6 with ht enabled , which is lolgically 1.8 with ht but at 140w
It would be beneficial to Anandtech and its readers to edit articles like this more closely. It has multiple instances of confusing wording and wordiness.
I mean this as constructive criticism in case it escaped your attention, in the hope that Anandtech will not let its standards slip.
Clarification: can you post the model of IGP (4400,4600) in your charts? This can be very useful for someone who is saving power by not having a discrete GPU but wants the best Intel offers.
I don't know why you're using Linux-Bench. Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) is *the* well-established benchmark suite for Linux, and it can test a wide range of applications and synthetic benchmarks in a completely automated fashion.
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nathanddrews - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Hmph.Khenglish - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
So you think these CPUs really are better binned? An undervolted K series cannot always pull off the voltages at the same clocks as a S series?If so do you think these better binned chips finally at least match Ivy Bridge in terms of performance per watt?
casteve - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
No, they aren't better binned. Another site looked at the voltage vs. freq curve and found that the std TDP, S, and T parts all followed the same curve. That i7 S part looks like an oddball.Samus - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
I work with HP Elitedesk 800's all the time with I5-4570S CPU's. They're incredibly small and quiet, much more so than the identically sized USFF dc7900 Core 2 Duo's they replaced.name99 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
We constantly hear about how aggressively Intel bins parts, how each model is a special snowflake that's exactly optimized for its role, etc etc. I've yet to see any evidence that this is actually true (as opposed to "Intel engages in very aggressive market segmentation --- by product name".The primary reason I'm not convinced is that no-one else bins nearly as aggressively. Apple, never a company to miss the opportunity for a dollar, doesn't engage in some obvious binning (eg ship the iPhone6+ at 100MHz faster; or even give you a 100MHz speed boost in each model as you go from 16GB to 32GB to 64GB storage). Qualcomm offers a fairly limited palette of Snapdragon speeds. Samsung, the master if there ever was one, at slicing and dicing phone models, doesn't offer the same phone at speeds of 1, 1.5, and 2GHz; etc etc.
We have to assume that
- everyone else's processes are crazy uniform compared to Intel OR
- Intel is MUCH smarter than anyone in how they are able to bin OR
- binning (at the micro segmentation Intel offers) just is not a real thing
and the third option seems the most plausible to me.
Samus - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Almost nobody pays attention to GHz numbers in mobile devices. Nobody really cares. And the scaling with ARM really means nothing. Apple consistently has among the highest performance ARM CPU's yet they're lower clocked and lower core count than everyone else. Binning ARM CPU's would require two things in order to be profitable: real-world benefits to a slightly higher clock speed, and marketing the higher clock speed as worth the premium. Currently there are neither. I'd guess 99/100 people don't even know the clock speed of the phone they own, because that's how irrelevant it is. For many applications (such as gaming, where performance is not consistent across the majority of devices) the GPU matters more than the CPU because of how heavily optimized these apps are for the GPU.The PC landscape is totally different.. You still have PC's sold that have 1/10th the performance of a Core i7.
Now, where your idea could be interesting is if they sell an "eco" chip that runs at a lower voltage due to binning. People MIGHT be willing to pay extra for a phone with +20% battery life.
Kjella - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
Or perhaps the simplest and most obvious explanation - Apple feels they're more in the console game than the PC game. Offer one consistent level of performance across all iPhones of the same generation and that's the spec all developers need to relate to.Hrel - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
- everyone else's processes are crazy uniform compared to Intel OR- Intel is MUCH smarter than anyone in how they are able to bin OR
Those are both true.
wumpus - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
So Intel chips can't be overclocked and produce more watts than different lettered processors under identical conditions? That isn't what was tested and would be a rather shocking development.Chips take a considerable time to fab. Markets change fast and somehow Intel manages to produce what the market needs in the face on negligible competition? Yea, I really believe that they are really binning and not simply segementing to what marketing wants.
BSMonitor - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
Use case. A PC's use case is an entirely different world than mobile phones. Your anti-Apple bias aside, what applications would users engage in on their smart phone where CPU performance could be noticeably segregated by clock speed. In this space. The only indication of CPU performance is the "snapiness" of the response from whatever app you are in.In a PC sense, I could launch an application or task that takes minutes, hours, etc.. 200-300 MHz would be noticeable over the course of an hour of video compression.
Apples and oranges.
patrickjchase - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
I used to work on SoCs in process nodes down to 28 nm, and the variation from the fast/fast (low-delay, leaky) to the slow/slow (high-delay, low-leakage) corners in modern processes is substantial. The fact that a given vendor isn't binning simply means that they're adding a fair bit of margin.For that matter I wouldn't be so sure that Apple doesn't bin. For example it's possible that the A7s in iPhone 5s and iPad Air were binned differently.
Finally, Intel's volumes create additional binning opportunities. A process condition that happens, say, 0.1% of time time would constitute such as small volume as to be useless to most vendors but adds up to a nice niche for Intel.
aj654987 - Friday, May 15, 2015 - link
I think its reasonable to believe they are binned. From a business perspective, is it really necessary to have THAT many different CPU models that Intel has? At some point you can have too many products and theyre competing with each other. Look at GM and how they had too many brands and rebadged vehicles that are competing with each other. I dont think there IS any business advantage to artificially create as many different chip models as intel has, though there is a business advantage to being able to salvage chips they would otherwise have to toss.When comparing to ARM processors, those are less complex and less expensive. If they have an ARM chip that tests bad, it may make more sense to toss it then to cripple it and sell it as a lower model. Also like consoles there is a preference to have the same speed across all devices, where as with a PC, different CPU speeds seem more acceptable to the market.
eanazag - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
The 65W parts seemed to show increased performance in IGP gaming versus their non-S counterparts. 4790S vs 4790. I would suspect the TDP budget for the IGP is unaffected by the TDP reduction and therefore might get a little thermal room to run harder. Looking at Intel ARK the 4790 series all runs at 350 base and 1.2 max; the 4790K is able to boost higher to 1.25GHz. The IGP gaming number seem to tell this story.You can also see when a discrete GPU is thrown in there the non-S parts then perform above the S parts in gaming.
For IGP gaming AMD is still the best choice; and that is about all they're good for.
evilspoons - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
This is the story in thermally-limited situations like the Surface Pro 3. The i5 model is faster at games than the i7 simply because the i5's CPU uses less of the thermal budget so the iGPU can stay faster for longer. In a more extreme case, running old non-CPU bound games (World of Warcraft), the i3 model is even better - the CPU leaves even more room for the iGPU.Of course, this could all be avoided by the game simply going "hmm, which one is really slowing me down - the CPU loop or the GPU loop?" and then throttling one to match, but the odds of that happening any time soon are pretty poor.
mortenelkjaer - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
IGP gaming, What is that?MrSpadge - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
No. The regular Intel 22 nm CPUs are so good that they can run ~4.0 GHz at ~1.0 V, whereas stock gives them almost 1.2 V at the top turbo bin. So cutting down on power consumption hardly requires any effort.Samus - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Eventually wear and leakage will cause tapering. The long-term reliability is Intel's goal which is why these chips are so conservatively clocked. I've already read reports of people running Haswell at 1.3V that initially had them stable at 4.6+GHz and a year later, can't crack 4.2GHz at 1.2V.Keeping these things around 1.0V is key to their service life. As Spadge said, try to get the most you can out of the stock voltage (usually 4GHz, sometimes more.)
B3an - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Completely off topic, but you guys do an article on AMD's new "Omega" driver? It has loads of new features and i can't find anywhere that's done a proper in-depth article on it.DiHydro - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
The Tech Report, and PCPer both have articles about the features and performance gains of the Omega driver release.JarredWalton - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
It's in the works. Ryan and I both were out for a few days due to illness, unfortunately.eanazag - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
That would directed at Ryan Smith and maybe jarred Walton for the mobile side of the equation. I suspect that the mobile side is unaffected at the moment.The only card that is well supported by all the new features in Omega is the R9 285 (Tonga). The R9 290 and 290X make a decent showing but are missing the 4K virtual resolution support.
chekk - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Based on some other reviews, I was starting to think Anandtech had switched back to separate power consumption idle and load numbers, but here we go again. Please stop.The audience here is enthusiasts and enthusiasts want the complete picture.
DiHydro - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
I agree, if I have a server that is idle most of it's life, I want to know how many watts it is drawing at idle. On the other hand, if it is running 100% 24/7 then I want to see if a higher TDP, better performing CPU will be cost effective over a cheaper lower TDP part that might run a task longer.alacard - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Xbitlabs did an excellent write up on the 4670S and T variants. Idle results for those can be found here: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-...Ultimately extremely disappointing results. Intel couldn't even be bothered to do the bare minimun and bin these chips for better perf/watt. Pathetic.
TiGr1982 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Captain Obvious tells us all, that Intel has a very weak competition on the x86 CPU front in all the recent years (I would say, right from the launch of Sandy Bridge LGA1155 almost 4 years ago). So, they make big money "for free" (in a sense that it's an easy money for them) all these years and don't have to bother about such peculiarities as better perf/watt...Khenglish - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
That xbitlabs review is very good and what I would have liked to see done here.Yeah bad results. I was hoping that these new parts meant that intel improved haswell's power efficiency, but in reality they just lowered the TDP.
smilingcrow - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
This feels like almost a completely wasted review, a sort of Seinfeld review; a review about nothing.Most things you can surmise about these S chips as many things scale linearly so it would have been good to have seen a much better focus on power consumption.
The unanswered question is whether these chips use different voltages than the stock chips and also a lack of hard power data; the delta data is not enough.
Also what did you use to load the cores?
It says AVX but what application and is AVX a good example to use as how many applications use it?
I’d like to have seen a focus on different CPU loads to determine the different characteristics of these S chips; INT, FP, AVX.
So rather than the multitude of redundant data that can deduced from scaling of frequency why not something focused and new!
What a wasted opportunity and a poorly thought out review.
theKai007 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Intel announced the Intel IoT Platform, a reference model end-to-end designed to unify ans simplify connectivity and security for the Internet of Things. http://bit.ly/1yCMSnBname99 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Look at the partners.Looks more like a enterprise software "solution" to acquire/store/extract data from than actual hardware or anything of interest to normal folks.
As long as Intel's HW story in that space is Quark, forget it...
xeizo - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Right on spot, I use a 4570S in my Linux home server. But as an enthusiast I did some bclk(couldn't resist it) to 106.4 so that it Turbo:s to 3.83GHz and multithreadsx4 to 3.4GHz ;-) Anyway, it feels very fast running Linux. I couldn't have used a K-processor as I wouldn't be able to resist maximum clock it, no power saving server ...Gaming is done on a 4.8GHz 2600K, it doesn't look like a need to replace it anytime soon. Unless Skylake surprises us all.
Nice job informing about those lower power cpus, saves us time from undervolting and just draws less power from day one.
MrSpadge - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
> lower power cpus, saves us time from undervolting and just draws less power from day one.That's not the same. Low power CPUs limit your clock sped when you need it most, i.e. under full load. Whereas undervolting delivers full performance, or in TDP limited cases even higher performance. It does cut into the OC headroom, though.
xeizo - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
I expressed it badly, sorry. The point is as these cpus are TDP-limited you know how much they will draw the most, and can design cooling/case etc. based on that, and in "99%" of home user cases you don't need the extra performance of 4xfull load+OC without restraints - the cpu is fast during "normal" use. Even gaming. It's not the best buy for a pure rendering box or similar though ...xeizo - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Btw, I noticed at a customer they had replaced all the workstations with mini-ITX HP:s, running 4570S and having SSD:s. They felt very snappy.azazel1024 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
It would be nice to see what the idle power consumption is with like setups on some of the processors. In addition it is a shame that you have dV for power consumption for the Pentium models...but there are NO performance benchmarks for them. Both of the Haswell pentiums have roughly the same power consumption of the i3-4130t, but no idea what they actually can put up in terms of performance. Also rather suprised that the older Ivy Bridge i3 has such low power consumption, but seems to average slightly better than the i3-4130t.Too bad no test of the 4MB cache and higher clocked Hasy i3-ts. That would have been interesting, as that is almost exactly what I am thinking of replacing my G1610 server with. Though realistically by the time I get around to it, I'll probably be looking at a Broadwell based server.
piasabird - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
A lot of the 35 watt i3 CPU's are not available for sale anywhere. Especially the Haswell with the 4 meg cache and the 4600 graphics. One question I would pose is cant you just buy a regular i3 and just underclock it to use less power?MrSpadge - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Yes. XBitLabs tested exactly that and the result is the same as the S/T models. The automatic voltage-frequency scaling of Turbo does all the magic behind the scenes (i.e. lowers the voltage when you lower the clock).sireangelus - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Could we have mixed amd/intel linux test? it's very interesting to see since the compilers optimize more fairly.XZerg - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Ian, man - seriously you need to stop these retarded Delta charts! They are useless! To make these even worse is that you are testing low wattage cpus. the people interested in such cpus are usually interested in idle and load numbers separately. what you have has no reference point to workout either the idle or load numbers.quit with these useless charts. there are many who have agreed to this.
sweetie peach - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Agreed. Also the idle and load voltages would have been helpful.BrokenCrayons - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
I like the review, but I agree with this. I think readers would understand that their individual results are going to be different because they won't be running identical configurations, but we can do the simple subtraction ourselves if we want to see the difference in load versus idle. I'd much prefer getting the total system wattage at idle and load from a review. It seems more useful to me to see those raw numbers actually posted.azazel1024 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Can we also move away from having a GPU in the system for tested idle and load power consumption? It is one more source of bluring on what is actually using the power. Everything on the chart has an iGPU and in most cases businesses or low power users are going to be leaning on the iGPU, not a dGPU. So seeing what system power consumption is without a dGPU is important, even if all systems have the same contribution from an identical dGPU (it means a lot more if the dGPU is contributing 10w at idle...so suddenly you have a 3w difference between processor models...but the idle is 10w for one and 13w for another, instead of 20w and 23w).barleyguy - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Delta charts are more accurate, and easier to generate, than absolute numbers. An absolute number will either be "total system power" or "total system power minus an estimate of non-processor power". The first is useless as information about the processor, because it isn't comparable across platforms, and the second is only an estimate unless hardware mods are done for power taps. For a chart that has such a large number of processors on it, the estimation errors for calculating discrete draw would likely put the chips in the wrong order.rootheday3 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
For people who are using the onboard graphics, a 1250 power supply, even one that is Gold rated, is going to be pretty inefficient at low power.I know it is nice/convenient to have a single common setup for testing both with and without graphics and it makes things "apples-to-apples" but it doesn't match how I would build a system. If I really only intend to use the onboard graphics, I would try to pick a power supply that was sized appropriately.
For users trying to understand the platform/cpu idle and load power, it seems like it would be beneficial to have both idle and load power reported AND appropriately sized power supply for the test conditions.
Daniel Egger - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
> If I really only intend to use the onboard graphics, I would try to pick a power supply that was sized appropriately.Good luck with that. There're almost no appropriately sized PSUs for such systems available on the market; seems like they're all exclusively designed for and sold to big OEMs.
azazel1024 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Not really. The idle power of the CPU very well might be different between the different CPUs combined (which can be sussed out if they all use the same hardware configuration excepting the CPU). Idle to load might only be a 10w difference for one CPU...but it might idle using 20w for the CPU. Another CPU might be a 15w difference from idle to load, but it might idle at 5w...making it a much more power efficient CPU overall.rootheday3 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
At idle, CPUs enter pkg c states and burn less than 1w regardless of sku/stepping/binningpiasabird - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
http://download.intel.com/support/processors/corei...It must be because intel is not selling the CPU's in boxed retail set. 4360T, 4350T, 4330T, 4160T, 4150T, 3250T are not available boxed, but are valid parts. My guess is you have to order them as tray and are only available to OEM's. However, they may be available through a small OEM custom computer builder shop.
sweetie peach - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
I have been using the i7-4790S for the past 4 months and there is something very strange about the results. The cinebench multithreaded bench is way too high. This cpu turbos to 3.6GHz with 4 cores so it can not possibly have the same score as a non-S that turbos to 3.8 GHz with 4 cores. Also my own average results are 160 for single and 740 for multi (HT enabled of course). Maybe there is something wrong with my setup but it doesn't feel slow in any way. It was very difficult to get hold of but it made sense because i want a very quiet computer even at load.otherwise - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Do any of these support ECC? Or do you still need a sandy-bridge era i3 to get that feature?Cerb - Sunday, December 14, 2014 - link
Most, if not all, the Haswell Core i3 CPUs support ECC, as do all of the Xeon E3 V3 series.Gowan08 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
I am happy to see these CPUs doing so well for the price. I used the i5 S for a whitebox esxi server build and I couldn't be happier. I ended up building 2 as a way to get to VSAN in my home. the low power consumption works when you are planning to leave the server running for long periods of time. Rock solid processor.StrangerGuy - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
As somebody with a stock 4790K I have completely no idea just *what* exactly is the point of these new chips. It doesn't save any power over regular Haswells with regular consumer workloads when cores simply idle while sacrificing significant performance for insignificant power savings for heavy CPU loads.Daniel Egger - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
That's interesting, the numbers tell exactly the opposite and many people would argue the other way round that the little bit extra in performance for special cases (SLI setups, HPC, ...) is not worth the additional energy use at idle and load and even less the additional noise for the more capable cooling system.Peter Cordes - Friday, March 27, 2015 - link
They all use the same power at idle. The lower TDP processors make it safe to use a weaker fan or put them somewhere with worse airflow, even in the worst case when something does load the CPU for an extended duration.This and the xbitlabs article someone else linked show that the low-power variants behave the same as the regular versions, except for throttling down out of turbo sooner or farther under extended load. They are NOT more energy efficient, either in the CPU or the IGP.
HPC is the use-case where these lower TDP chips are exactly the opposite of what you want, unless you're really constrained by cooling, or your workload is actually constrained by memory latency but your CPUs are ramping up to max speed anyway.
Cerb - Sunday, December 14, 2014 - link
It does indeed save power, and the review shows exactly that. That is in fact the entire point. 84W may be too high for some scenarios, so there is a demand for CPUs with lower TDP. The Lenovo Outlet has several such PCs for sale at this very moment, that aren't much bigger than my unmanaged switch. I doubt an i7-4790K could be quietly cooled in such a small enclosure.bsim500 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
These reviews are getting worse...1. I agree with the others. Please include separate idle & load power consumption. Include delta if you want *in addition* to not instead of.
2. Why on Earth would you attempt to review low-power CPU's on a 1250w PSU? This is a large part of the reason why there's only a 2w apparent difference between a 35w "T" and a 53w regular Pentium / i3 - at sub 5% loads the "+90% efficiency at 20-80% load" curve rapidly falls away to as low as 70%, even 60% on some PSU's. It can also add up to 20w to idle consumption which defeats the whole point of a low powered chip. The 35w "T" chips in particular are often used in slim TDP limited cases like the Akasa Euler (typically fed from an external 80-160w "brick" Pico-PSU / SFX PSU's or at most 360-400w Gold ATX (where a 70-80w load would be within the 20-80% load "90% efficiency sweet spot" of Gold PSU's)).
3. Idle to load delta power consumption (with no actual idle / load figures) is even worse than "delta only temps" and results in totally useless figures up to 20w out of whack for intended market (thin Mini-ITX) when it comes from a <5% load on a 1250w PSU that no-one would use on such chips. Again - PLEASE just show idle & load watts / temps in future.
4. The i3-4130T has been replaced (at same price) by the i3-4160T which is 200Mhz faster.
5. Is the Haswell +0.1v auto-overvolt on AVX Prime power virus load test really suitable for load testing on low-power CPU's which more than likely won't be fully loaded (or running constant load AVX apps)?
wintermute000 - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
"Why on Earth would you attempt to review low-power CPU's on a 1250w PSU?"THIS
BrokenCrayons - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
I can kind of understand the PSU wattage. The same PSU has to be used across a lot of different system configurations ranging from very low demand hardware to extremely powerful, multi-GPU builds otherwise the results across the entire range become incomparable and possibly less valuable to readers. Then again, it has been a frequently mentioned sticky point for readers. Maybe branching out to a couple of PSUs that are of slightly more suitable wattage for their application would be useful. I think a lot of Anandtech readers, while very interested in tech reviews, aren't always looking for the very fastest and most powerful hardware available. The site does a really good job catering to that audience (I think so anyhow since sort of consider myself one of those kinds of readers who wants elegant, practical computing solutions instead of the biggest/fastest at any cost) with the exception of the PSU sizing problem you mentioned and the lack of absolute consumption numbers. But still, go easy on them. They have a lot of work to keep them busy and a lot of feedback to consider that might sometimes get conflicted between reader opinions.MrSpadge - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
The moderate binning should not require different CPUs. It would be nice if Intel simply used the already established tool of cTDP to offer users a choice. Run normally during winter and switch to power reduced mode in summer, or when a long video transcode is needed. Provide a simple app or windows switch for this. The Win Vista/7 gadgets would be ideal for this. Oh, and this software could be used on notebooks & tablets too, where it would be far more useful.Winterblade - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
This was just what I needed to read to convince myself of buying the Alienware Alpha base model :)dave_the_nerd - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
I have a custom build SFF system with a 4670T, so... yay!Dahg - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
One of the really interesting aspects of the i3-4130T processors is that they work on workstation motherboards with ECC memory (unlike the i5 and i7). Perfect for building a NAS instead of using the low power Xeons. When buying an i3, make sure whether you'll be getting one with or without integrated GPU.Mickatroid - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
I recently built a system with a an i5-4690s. I still used a decent cooler (Scythe Big Shuriken 2). Why the lower TDP part? It is for my workshop. It gets hot in there and it is a machine that I want working reliably for a very long time. The S processor was an obvious choice. I ended up still less than 45degrees above ambient running IntelBurnTest. Very nice. Dust filtering is provided by an automotive 'pod' filter. Just thought it worth mentioning since it is a use case that is not quite the same as those mentioned at the end of the (interesting thanks) review.Gigaplex - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
Here we have a review of low power CPUs, and there's pretty much no analysis on the actual power usage. There's one delta test that shows the supposedly low power CPU drawing way more power than it should, with no follow up tests. What I want to know is, how much power do I actually save with these chips.alacard - Thursday, December 11, 2014 - link
That'd be zero. Here's your answer from a REAL review: http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-...Anandtech, get your act together for Christ's sake.
CountDown_0 - Saturday, December 13, 2014 - link
I don't want to play the devil's advocate, but... Do you seriously think xbitlabs's review is a real one? They wrote 8 pages about low TDP processors (where the "T" stands for thermal) and they didn't bother to check the temperatures. Nor noise, for that matter, and considering that these processors are an obvious candidate for mini ITX systems, where both temperature and noise are an issue, I wouldn't say it is a real review. Ok, noise might be less important, but holy crap, these CPUs have a lower thermal design and you don't even have a look at temperatures? And no, checking the power is not enough. The relationship between power and temperature is not so linear.But I have to say they did a very good job by checking the voltage, revealing that these CPU's aren't binned. Which is surprising, in my opinion, as it contradicts both this review and common sense.
Anyway I have to agree with you that AT's review is also disappointing. Apart from the choice of a huge PSU, whose motivation (uniformity across all tests) does at least make sense - and anyway I am interested in the difference between processors, not so much in absolute values, so it isn't too bad - they have taken a performance-centric approach. Checking the performance is ok, but then you also have to check power and temperatures (ok, I'll leave noise aside), and they didn't do too much about this either. They have only one graph about temperatures. I am really surprised to see that the i7 4790s (65W) is 7° hotter than the the 4770k (84W), and there isn't a single word about this. They just say that the power consumption is also higher, and it might be "a bit alarming". Well, I'd say it is more than a bit alarming: the CPU is clearly slower, and then it consumes more and gets hotter??? Maybe Intel is binning CPUs after all, it's just the other way around: for S models they choose the crappiest ones! :-D Seriously, that demands further investigation. As things look right now, buying an S model wouldn't make sense.
In the end, both reviews leave my question unanswered: is it a good idea to choose an S model for a mini-ITX system to keep temperatures down? I think I will have to use pcpartpicker and some forums to figure out. But it is a very long, slow and painful research, and I wish I could have spared it.
alacard - Saturday, December 13, 2014 - link
I'd say that comparison between xbitlab and anandtech's reviews is entirely valid given that Anandtech's review is more like an empty shell of a partial review whereas xbitlabs actually digs down into the chips and analyzes them. We're in agreement that more attention wasn't paid to the power, temperature, noise aspect in either review though. I'm not sure what happened but those three metrics used to be standard, and now it's like we're lucky to even get them and when we do they're often half-assed.Take a look at Anandtech's review here and you'll notice more than half of the words in it are dedicated to explaining what the benchmark programs are good for testing. Take those useless paragraphs out and you're left with piratically nothing: a tiny bit of analysis and a smattering of charts. This is one of the laziest writeups i can recall seeing on this site. It provides almost no insight and sheds almost no light on the items it's analyzing.
Anandtech used to be the gold standard in tech analysis, and now they're no longer even the first site i visit when an embargo lifts on a highly anticipated recently released piece of tech. Being the best was their crown to lose, and i'm afraid they've lost it. This "review" is just another nail in the coffin.
ruthan - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
Finally someone cares about nature and my ears, results are better than i expected, im using those S and T procesors for last 4 years and im completely happy with them. Even todays low power Xeons are great.happycamperjack - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
Could you guys add more CPU intensive gaming benchmarks next time such as Crysis 3, Dragon Age Inquisition and Assassin's Creed Unity? Thanks.Beaver M. - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
I have been using a i7-4770S for 8 months and its really fast enough while not drawing too much power (I still get it over 80W, if I use Prime95). Very important to me to limit the power, since mine runs on battery.What I dont like however is that the T and S are also not soldered to the heatspreader. That means they get far too hot for small coolers. I had to delid mine and use liquid metal paste between heatspreader and die. I got 20°C less through that. Now the small cooler can run much more silent and I still only get 65°C max. On top of that, since it runs much cooler, it also draws about 5 to 10 Watts less, depending on what it does.
Wolfpup - Friday, December 12, 2014 - link
I'm actually looking at an HP all in one (for a kitchen computer) that has an S series CPU, and was wondering what the heck it was.35 watts for a dual core Haswell @ at least 2.9GHz is actually really impressive when you think about it. I still can't help but compare everything to my 125-watt single core 3.4GHz Prescott from ten years ago. That's a ton more performance crammed in to about 1/4 the power :) Also seems like the 35 watt parts are basically like the normal mobile parts are (before low end systems switched from 35 and 45 watt cpus to 15-19 watt ULV CPUs practically across the board)
samer1970 - Saturday, December 13, 2014 - link
Hello,can you please run the benchmarks again for the xeons with HT disabled? i want to see how the 65Watts 12 cores compares to the 6 cores i7 with hyperthreading disabled on the 12 cores one.
that is 12 cores xeon at 1.8 ht disabled versus 6 cores at 3.6 with ht enabled , which is lolgically 1.8 with ht but at 140w
FYoung - Saturday, December 13, 2014 - link
It would be beneficial to Anandtech and its readers to edit articles like this more closely. It has multiple instances of confusing wording and wordiness.I mean this as constructive criticism in case it escaped your attention, in the hope that Anandtech will not let its standards slip.
LoneWolf15 - Sunday, December 14, 2014 - link
For future articles like this, can you post the integrated graphics? It can be crucial to people building an HTPC.LoneWolf15 - Sunday, December 14, 2014 - link
Clarification: can you post the model of IGP (4400,4600) in your charts? This can be very useful for someone who is saving power by not having a discrete GPU but wants the best Intel offers.coder543 - Sunday, December 21, 2014 - link
I don't know why you're using Linux-Bench. Phoronix Test Suite (PTS) is *the* well-established benchmark suite for Linux, and it can test a wide range of applications and synthetic benchmarks in a completely automated fashion.