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Today we are checking out the recently released Intel Haswell refresh which includes the 9-series chipsets and its accompanying motherboards. For testing we have motherboards from Asrock and Gigabyte which sport the flagship Intel Z97 chipset. Also along for the ride is the new Core i7-4790 quad-core processor...
Roughly this time last year Intel released their 4th generation Core processor architecture codenamed ‘Haswell’. Like ‘Ivy Bridge’ before it the 4th gen processors were manufactured using the 22nm design process. In terms of performance the jump from Ivy Bridge to Haswell was very minimal, around 10% at best and this was much like what we saw when coming from 2011’s Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge. This means for the past 3 years Intel has been moving in baby steps and today’s Haswell refresh doesn’t do anything to change that. In fact it won’t be until later in the fourth quarter of 2014 till we see anything new from Intel, as they are set to release Broadwell architecture which will mark the arrival of the 5th generation Core processors. Like the 4th generation Haswell processors the Broadwell processors will be fully compatible with LGA1150 boards, well at least those sporting an Intel 9-series chipset. Over the past few years Intel has been changing their CPU sockets more often than most users upgrade their PCs, with a socket seeing just two generations of CPUs in total.
 Intel call this their tick-tock model and it means that every architectural change will follow with a die shrink of the process technology. So every "tick" is a shrinking of process technology of the previous architecture and every "tock" is a new architecture. Every year to 18 months, there is expected to be one tick or tock. The Core i7 series made its initial debut on the LGA1366 platform back in 2008 as a 45nm part codenamed Bloomfield, remember the much loved and very overclockable Core i7-920. That was a tock. However a year later that platform was to share the Core i7 badge with the Lynnfield parts which used the LGA1156 socket. That said Lynnfield wasn’t a replacement for Bloomfield but rather offered a cheaper means to get hold of a Core i7 processor, so it was still technically a tock. Then two years later the last run of LGA1366 processors arrived, codenamed ‘Gulftown’ which was a die-shrink to 32nm, so therefore a tick. Then in 2011 along came Sandy Bridge which was a tock. Both the LGA1366 and LGA1156 platforms were made redundant by the LGA1155 socket. Though a month later Intel released the LGA2011 platform offering Core i7 processors quad-channel memory and up to a 15MB L3 cache. In 2012 Ivy Bridge was released, a tick and shared the LGA1155 socket with Sandy Bridge, while the Ivy Bridge-E processors didn’t arrive until 2013 for the LGA2011 platform. Also in 2013 the Haswell architecture ushered in yet another new socket, this time the LGA1150, tock. Now a year later we aren’t going to see the ‘tick’, at least not yet anyway... |
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Greg B |
Posted on: 05/21/2014 01:31 PM
I would take a look at the secondary timings on the ram with the AsRock boards again. I just set an Asrock Z97 board up and found that the secondary timings were much looser on the Asrock than they were on the Z97 Asus Pro. That might account for the differences you observed in testing. |
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Steven Walton Posts: 104 Joined: 2010-02-08 |
Posted on: 05/21/2014 10:09 PM
Thanks for the info Greg. Since I did my testing Asrock has updated the BIOS so I will flash my boards and then check the secondary timings. |