Inside Intel’s Haswell Architecture: Is It Worth Moving to?

Intel recently launched its fourth generati on processor, code named "Haswell", which promises many improvements over the earlier Ivy Bridge architecture. This time, we  received not only a sample CPU+mobo combo from Intel for review, but we also received several Haswell based motherboards from other vendors. Possibly, the motherboard manufacturers are excited about the new architecture and are keen to release it in the market as early as possible. Before getting into the actual Haswell CPU and motherboard reviews, it would be good to get a quick glimpse at what's new in the processor architecture and how it enhances the motherboard's capabilities.

Understanding Haswell's Architecture

For one, while there are improvements in Haswell over Ivy Bridge, most of them have been done for the mobile versions meant for notebooks and ultrabooks. These  enhancements are aimed at improving batt ery life and graphics performance of notebooks and ultrabooks. To be more specifi c, as per intel, if an ultrabook gave five hours backup on Ivy Bridge, then it will give nine hours with Haswell, which is a quantum jump in power effi ciency!

The Haswell architecture supports a new series of chipset on the motherboard, called Intel's 8 series, which comprise of Z87, H87 and H81. So while the new chipset is backward compati ble with CPUs from series 6 & 7 chipsets (provided the BIOS also supports it), Haswell itself will only work on the new chipset. The series 8 chipsets have been built on existi ng series 7 chipsets with some enhancements. Both for instance, support up to 14 USB ports and 6 SATA ports, but the 8-series chipset can provide six USB 3.0 ports (instead of 4 in Series 7) and six SATA III ports instead of two SATA III and four SATA II in series 7.

The Haswell desktop CPUs also use a new socket, LGA 1150. Like Ivy Bridge, the Haswell processor is also based on the 22 nm manufacturing process but it carries a newly designed architecture. This implementati on of Haswell uses 1.6 billion transistors, up from Ivy Bridge's 1.4 billion. The front-end of Haswell uses the same executi on engine (14-19 staged pipeline) as that of Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge. But, here the number of ports has been increased by two (for ALU & Store), thus enabling it to execute eight operati ons per clock cycle.

One major enhancement in Haswell is a newer GPU. As claimed by Intel, the graphics capabiliti es have nearly double from the fastest Sandy Bridge version of Intel HD Graphics. Added memory of 128 MB is given to the GPU which helps in operati ng it as shared L4 cache for both graphics and the CPU cores.

Block Diagram of Haswell Platform Architecture

Is it Worth Moving to Intel Haswell?

A newer motherboard and processor architecture always brings with it many enhancements, but that doesn't necessarily mean that you should buy it. The same goes with Haswell. Let's examine who should use Intel Haswell.

For one, Haswell is a new architecture and uses a new CPU socket (LGA 1150), which is not backward compatible with Intel's previous generation Ivy Bridge architecture that's based on LGA 1155 socket. So, you won't be able to upgrade to Haswell. Both the motherboard and processor would have to be changed.

A lot of enhancements in Haswell have happened in the mobile version of Haswell, so if you have a decent desktop, you don't need to go for Haswell.

While Haswell has a much better GPU than Ivy Bridge, it's still not powerful enough to satiate the needs of gamers. So if you're a gamer, you'll still need to go for a discrete graphics card. As of writing this article, there was negligile difference between the price of Haswell and Ivy Bridge processors ($339 for core i7-4770k & $332 for core i7-3770k). So if you're looking to buy a Core i7 based desktop, then it makes sense to go for Haswell architecture.

Haswell based motherbards consume half as much power as Ivy Bridge based ones, so if you're conscious about your electricity bills, or you intend to buy desktops in bulk, then Haswell is the way to go. Haswell's performance is moderately better than its predecessors, and may not provide a very strong case for the newer architecture.

How We Tested

To test the Haswell based motherboards that we received, we used an Intel Core i7 4770k processor, 64- bit Windows 7 Ultimate, 4 GB DDR3 RAM, 4 TB HDD and Nvidia GeForce GTX 770 graphics card. We ran a couple of benchmark on the motherboard, which included PcMark 7, 3DMark11, HWMonitor_1.22.1 and CPU-Z_1.64.2. These benchmarks were used to judge different aspects of the motherboard's performance, like its processing ability, graphical ability, power consumption, etc. We compared all motherboards for performance, price, and features.