Still, it becomes clear that the caching that already exists is really great – an enormous L4 cache only gives relatively low gains.
Agreed, it's really only a big win if you have a working set in the "dozens of MBs" sort of size range of course. That's quite common for graphics, but less common for CPU workloads; that said, some of that is because they have been optimized for current L3$ sizes
Considering how much IPC Ivy already has, I'd call those 10% gains awesome ... And clearly, parallelism has not been figured out yet. Which is actually why Intel can afford devoting more and more die space exclusively to the GPU.
Yep totally agreed, that was the point I was trying to make
People keep unrealistically expecting their legacy stuff that uses 1-4 threads to keep getting faster when that is clearly not going to happen indefinitely... frankly I consider *any* IPC improvements at this stage to be minor miracles.
Also, it does not seem that Intel really cares about parallelism for consumers. I'm one of those people who would gladly buy an i7-4xxxR chip (BGA with GT3e on desktop), except that TSX is disabled on this chip – and if TSX does become very useful for consumer applications, it will be unavailable to me.
Yeah the TSX segmentation seems like a poor idea to me, especially with it not being supported on the K-series parts. Don't get that all. Granted it is more important with more cores, but still.
Reviewers who get samples for free tend to forget how important the price point is and like to sing victory to a product that costs twice as much as its nearest competitor.
AMD is simply not competing against the Haswell line with APUs at the moment, period.
To consumers, sure, but the point is that in reality they simply set the price depending on how competitive it is in practice. You don't think they *want* to charge $300 for it? You think they are choosing to not have a high-end competitive part? Obviously not, especially with all of the noise they have been making about APUs.
So sure, they're not going to commit suicide by pricing their stuff above higher performing parts, but the retail prices are sort of incidental in an architectural discussion.