It’s party time for component manufactures! We saw Nvidia GeForce GTX 770, a GPU last week and completing the picture Intel released brand new Haswell CPU. The new Haswell Z87 CPU architecture is replacing previous Z77 Ivy Bridge series. But still it’s behind beastly X79 series.
Let’s go and take a look at what Haswell has to offer.
New Features in Haswell
Specification
When we are talking about CPU the first thing that comes to your minds is clock speed. Then you have to pay attention to number of cores, hyper-threading, Cache, built in GPU etc.
Surprisingly you won’t be able to find out any significant different between Ivy Bridge and Haswell any of above factors other than GPU. Haswell comes with HD 4600 GPU instead of previous HD 4000. Click here to see the full comparison.
Performance
After considering many benchmarking result and usage test I can make below statements.
- In CPU intensive work Haswell is slightly better than Ivy bridge..
- With built in GPU Haswell is ~3X better than Ivy Bridge.
- With external GPU Haswell is slightly better than Ivy Bridge.
We are actually trying to figure out what is new in Haswell processor. But we are continuously running in to that fact that it’s only about in-built GPU. Is that all? Keep reading.
Power Consumption
Last year laptop computers had a paradigm shifting change. Their form-factor changed drastically. Today you can see very thin Ultrabooks and full PCs in the shape of Tablets. That’s where power consumption comes in to picture.
Haswell CPU is designed to work only slightly faster than Ivy Bridge by consuming much lesser power. True that maximum power consumption is higher in Haswell. But when in idle mode it consumes only 50% of power compared to Ivy Bridge. This is very important for UltraBooks and especially for Tablets.
Finally
The big question, “I have an Ivy Bridge. Should I upgrade it to Haswell?” I have a pretty straight forward answer. For a PC there is no point. If you are buying a Laptop of Tablet, YES go for Haswell.
PCs are always connected to main power grid. So power consumption is not a major issue. If you are planning to reduce electricity bill with Haswell, it will be only couple of bucks. The price that you have to pay for it is a new motherboard and Haswell CPU. If you consider processing power, even there you are getting insignificant improvement.
But if you are getting a Laptop, Ultrabook or Tablet, then you have to pay attention to battery life. In that case it’s worth investing some extra money for longer battery life.
Tags: #Intel #Notebook #Tablet