I Can Hazwell?

Ah yes, they do this for VT-d, ECC support and other fringe things (TxT, vPro). A non-K CPU enables back most of it, and for ECC you have to get down to core i3.
They do market segmentation at every step, on the high end they don't want you to get away with running a 4.5GHz CPU on the cheapest Z77 or Z87 motherboard and get all these "pro" features.
 
What's up with the L2 throughput measured in Sandra? Haswell is supposed to read a full cache-line in a single cycle from that region. Is there some special conditions, or it is something with the benchmark method?
 
Blazkowicz said:
I don't know how to take it, regarding relevance of AVX, but Intel disables it on all Pentium and Celeron processors, because, hum!, because they feel like it.
Hopefully they'll enable it on Haswell celeron and pentium and go on disabling the other features instead (clearvideo, quicksync, TxT etc.)

Game developers and middleware developers can do both binaries with SSE 2 or 3 and AVX as feature levels, probably (as says Exophase). Around 1997 we had Pod and Pod MMX (and worse, they'd be various hard-wired versions for a few proto-GPUs).
Since consoles CPUs have AVX it seems a given that most major game engines and gaming middleware will use it.
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That really is a daft decision. They don't even let you pay $50 bucks to enable it! (Forgot exactly what feature it was that Intel allowed you to do this for; it was either cache or virtualization or both.)
 
Blazkowicz said:
I don't know how to take it, regarding relevance of AVX, but Intel disables it on all Pentium and Celeron processors, because, hum!, because they feel like it.
Hopefully they'll enable it on Haswell celeron and pentium and go on disabling the other features instead (clearvideo, quicksync, TxT etc.)
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I think there's some hope. For the last few generations, intel just disabled the last major simd version on pentium/celerons - so from Core2 to Westmere celerons/pentiums had ssse3 (instead of 4.1/4.2), whereas SNB/IVB ones support sse4.2 instead of AVX. Continuing that "tradition" would mean they'd have AVX but not AVX2 (and probably no fma/f16c neither).
 
I.S.T. said:
I'd be surprised if most games used anything but SSE2 or 3. Maybe if we're lucky, SSSE3.
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AVX is likely to get used by games on the next gen consoles. So there's a pretty good chance that as least AVX 1 will get used. I'm not sure there'd be a good reason to then not use it on PC versions of the same games. This obviously only applies to AAA games. Games that need to address a wider audience (casual focused games) are unlikely to bother.

Regards,
SB
 
Silent_Buddha said:
AVX is likely to get used by games on the next gen consoles. So there's a pretty good chance that as least AVX 1 will get used. I'm not sure there'd be a good reason to then not use it on PC versions of the same games. This obviously only applies to AAA games. Games that need to address a wider audience (casual focused games) are unlikely to bother.

Regards,
SB
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Will they use the 256-bit AVX instructions that will actually increase the theoretical throughput of Sandy Bridge and up processors, or will they use 128-bit AVX instructions that are more of a match to Jaguar's SIMD units?
 
Whether or not the 256-bit AVX instructions make sense depends on whether or not Jaguar can decode them in one cycle using one decoder. If this is the case it can be a win to use them even if they require two uops to execute, since it'll free decode bandwidth which can be the tightest bottleneck in the Jaguar pipeline. I'm not sure if this will be the case or not.. it may depend on whether or not AVX instructions are split into two COPs up front or a single COP that gets split into two uops later in the pipeline.

On BD 256-bit AVX was worse than 128-bit because the decoder could only handle one per cycle, while it could handle four 128-bit ops (and therefore two 128-bit pairs).
 
I won't buy another windows until they put the god damned start menu back in again, and stop that metro shit from popping up at login.
 
Rootax said:
MS want to roll one OS / year now I believe...
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But with reduced prices as well. I expect that with a yearly model, they are aiming at either a 29.99 or 39.99 price point. Similar to the Digital Distribution special they had going for the first few months of Win8. Physical media distribution may be more.

Regards,
SB
 
What? Windows Blue? it's the first time ever I see it mentioned.
Apparently it can be thought off both like a service pack and an OSX .1 release.
So, there's a kernel update that covers Haswell's power management basically, and likely various ARM SoC, maybe Jaguar power management.

A future version will cover ARMv8, etc. - I assume they keep Windows 8 x86, RT and phone in sync that way. The platform has to be updated more frequently for new tablets etc. so why not push the minor revision to PC each time as well, through downloads.


If you can indeed get it at $30, without needing to previously own Windows then many people may upgrade from their pirated or legit XP. That would help mitigate the end of support of Windows XP - we all risk a worldwide disaster one year from now when all these XP boxes get owned. It can be a shitstorm with massive data and identity theft, sprawling botnets etc. and can make Microsoft look bad as well as people flee to other platforms (be it linux, chromebook, android, or OSX for the well off)

So a cheap or affordable Windows can allow millions of people to install it and show Microsoft is doing something about the issue.
 
XP was a slow piece of crap when it came out, too, until it just flew on outdated PCs.
XP is on many millions of computers dating from 2005 to 2009, and btw Windows 8 or Blue requires the NX bit, which makes slow PCs incompatible with it.
Only the hard drive is the weak point with these computers (else they're mostly better than an ARM tablet)
 
XP and Vista both suffered from seriously underspec-ed budget shit PCs. Though I think it was quite hard to build a PC fast enough to make Vista feel fast in 2006. It needs a lot of HDD speed.

Grall said:
I won't buy another windows until they put the god damned start menu back in again, and stop that metro shit from popping up at login.
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Let the hate flow through you. :)
 
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