Intel Broadwell (Gen8)

Can't wait to see how that turns out. If gaming performance is good enough I may upgrade my HTPC with Broadwell this time and go without a low power discrete video card.

Regards,
SB

 

How good is good enough?

Unless some massive clock bumps are in order, It looks like Broadwell Gen8 with the highest end iGPU will be comparable to a desktop GK107, a Geforce GTX 650 (non-Ti).

 

Good enough would be something along Radeon 7750 level. It only has to be able to run games at 720p (upping the resolution to 1080p results in no noticeable increase in IQ on my TV at my living room viewing distance while also making text far too small to read).

Regards,
SB

 

I'm sure this has been mentioned in another thread but Steam streaming may also be worth considering if you have a more powerful PC elsewhere in the house on the same WiFi network. It works great for me on the laptop and you're not limited to just steam games, it will stream anything in your steam library, even those non-steam games you've added manually.

 

Yeah, that only works if I'm not doing local multiplayer gaming.

Regards,
SB

 

Eh not absolutely everything works correctly. I couldn't get Star Citizen working for example. And I've heard you can't get 5.1 audio. And you do lose a little image quality from the MPEG compression. One thing you'll probably notice is loss of color saturation / quality because it likely gets downsampled to YV12.

But it was neato to see my decapitated notebook HTPC (Core 2 + Mobility 4670) playing Thief at 1080p streamed from my big desktop.

 

Steam Home Streaming is definitely the future for PC gaming at home IMO but I agree that it's still not there as an overall permanent solution.
Lack of surround sound makes it a no-go for me since the living room is where I have my "big" sound setup, it's not 100% stable with all games and there is indeed a little bit of image quality loss from H.264 compression.
But I guess the future should bring higher compatibility with games, multi-channel AAC sound, eventually hardware encoding/devoding of HEVC with newer GPUs, etc.
We're definitely getting there.




Silent_Buddha, I suspect the amount of gaming you can do with a HD7750 is going to decrease a lot during the next couple of years. Even if you do persist on gaming only at 720p, perhaps you should put your bar a little higher.

Butt yes, broadwell's top of the line iGPU should approach a HD7750 in performance. Though for the pirce of such CPU, I'd say you would be better off with a discrete graphics card and a slower CPU variant, while spending less money.
For $125 you'll get a Bonaire, which should be twice as fast as a HD7750 and a mid-term between a PS4 and Xbone in raw performance.
$125 should probably be less than the difference between a modest i5 and the top-end i7 with an Iris Pro GPU.

 

With Haswell, a GT1 IGP is a half-slice (10 EU), GT2 is a full slice (20 EU) and a GT3* is 2 slices (40 EU).

The fact that Intel calls the Broadwell-Y IGP a "GT2" configuration has left me a little confused with the "GT" numbering system.

It's 1 slice + 1 half-slice... so what do you think a GT3 configuration will be? And will there be a GT4?

Also note that a Haswell GT2 has 160 ALUs while the Broadwell-Y GT2 has 192 ALUs (+20%).

Maybe a Broadwell GT3 will be... 384 ALUs or 3 full slices?

 

That's not really accurate. Things are composed of sub-slices, which contain the EUs, samplers, ... But for instance the ROPs aren't in there. So, Haswell GT1 has one subslice, GT2 has two, but ROPs etc. aren't doubled. This is different for GT3 which doubles that too (though some things still aren't doubled IIRC, especially at the frontend, though at least some of it beefed up in other ways).

Again, that's not accurate. GT2 is composed of 3 subslices (with 8 EUs each).
And, as far as I can tell, GT1/GT2/GT3 isn't really indicating scaling or some such, it's just a number from slowest to fastest. (I'm not actually sure if GT1 was leaked somewhere, if that's just 1 subslice with 8 EUs that would seem a bit poor.) GT3 should be 2x3 subslices probably. So just like Haswell GT2->GT3, it should double Broadwell GT2.

Yes, a result of 3x8 vs. 2x10 EUs (your ALU numbers aren't really, well, ALUs).

 

It looks like Intel's Stephen Junkins will be describing the Gen8 architecture next Wednesday at IDF14.

If anyone is attending then it would be great to get a write-up.

( In case anyone missed it, Junkins' Gen 7.5 architecture doc is here. )

 

this is promising. Would love to see how it would perform in a yoga or surface.

 

I don't suppose anyone has a copy of that deck? It looks like Intel has pulled it.

Edit: Looks like it's sensitive about the referrer. If you go through the IDF website it will download

 

That PDF can be found by crawling through this link. It has minimal information on the Gen8 IGP.

However, the excellent Gen8 PDFs by Stephen Junkins just popped up in the last hour or two here.

 

@mczak, a Gen8 "slice" is now defined as 3 subslices. That's an odd way of cutting a cake.

 

The benchmarks shown so far for a 4.5 watt core m The highest performing part are unbelievable it kills tegra k1 . in graphics and as far as CPU none come close. Its as I thought it would be . I just happy its over . Well I know what to get my grandkids for xmas. I likely won't wait till Xmas. . THis is impressive performance and its clear by 2016 inmtel will own the tablet market . Now if Intel can get cherry trail out in timely fashion it should be better than the highest end arm or Apple chips . If intel pricies these under arm high end tabs intel will put a big hurt on ARM . I am loving this . Sell your arm stocks fellas they are over with . If intel can do this . Phi at 10nm should be intel core m type chips . that will put big time hurt on NV . OH ya.

 

4.5W is what, 450% more than Apple A7?

Yeah, Arm's sooooooo dead.

 

Keep in mind that 3DMark Ice Storm Unlimited performance is very CPU-limited. On Tegra K1, the fps in game test 1 is > 200fps and the fps in game test 2 is > 100fps, so this test is not particularly stressful on the latest and greatest ultra mobile GPU's.

The GPU perf. of this Core M variant seems to be within ~ 10% of the Core i5 variant in the Surface Pro 3. Naturally this is very impressive given the lower power consumption. But the GPU perf. difference between Core M and Tegra K1 may not be significant with a more GPU-intensive benchmark such as GFXBench 3.0: