MSI and ASrock Haswell Motherboards caught on camera (photos)
A handful of motherboard manufacturers have been showing Haswell Motherboards at CeBIT. We took a couple of photo's. These motherboards are intended for Haswell processors which are to be released later this year. Haswell has 1150 pins which means it requires a new motherboard, the chipsets as well will see a die-shrink from 65nm towards 32nm. The chipset will support 14 USB ports of which 6 are USB 3.0, more after the break.
Next to that you'll spot six SATA3 / 600 on these motherboards. Asrock has been showing a complete final design motherboard whilst MSI was showing an extremely rough early sample of the Series 8 Lynx Point chipset based motherboard.
Have a peek at the photo's. The brown unrecognizable ones is likely MSI GD65 or GD80 and the other two are Asrock's offerings. ASRock had two LGA1150 motherboard models, the entry-level B85M and a high-end Z87-Extreme6.
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USB3.0 is backwards compatible so why would one need USB 2.0 ?
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Apparently the USB3.0 controller has an issue with waking up...
Also, the performance figures, clock vs clock to Ivy, isn't all that inspiring. There was a greater benefit going from Sandy to Ivy clock vs clock. The only thing that may make Haswell perform better is AVX2, for programs that can make use of it and support it.
You have to remember where Intel is going with Haswell.
Performance is not the key factor these days, power efficiency and low usage in general is the big one.
Intel desperately wants to get into Tablets and corner the ultraportable market for good. Haswell is their key into this, just like Silvermont (the new Atom) will be the key for the high end smartphone and low-mid end tablet market.
You have to remember what we're stuck with in the tablet market right now, that is CPU performance from 2006 roughly. If Haswell gets into tablets, it will be a completely disruptive product there.
It's really impressive to see Inte's "Tick-Tock" juggernaut in action.
P.S.- The USB3 thing is all rumors at this point, with no indication from anyone but the original anonymous source that this is an issue. I wouldn't place any emphasis on it till others start saying it as well.
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He draw that conclusion from those leaked x87 superPi benchmarks, all pretty much useless in today's world.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6355/intels-haswell-architecture/6
I mean why would they improve/change so much stuff and there wont be any perf. boost.. It doesnt make any sense, even less to judge it on those 3 leaked benchmarks.

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You have to remember where Intel is going with Haswell.
Performance is not the key factor these days, power efficiency and low usage in general is the big one.
Intel desperately wants to get into Tablets and corner the ultraportable market for good. Haswell is their key into this, just like Silvermont (the new Atom) will be the key for the high end smartphone and low-mid end tablet market.
You have to remember what we're stuck with in the tablet market right now, that is CPU performance from 2006 roughly. If Haswell gets into tablets, it will be a completely disruptive product there.
It's really impressive to see Inte's "Tick-Tock" juggernaut in action.
P.S.- The USB3 thing is all rumors at this point, with no indication from anyone but the original anonymous source that this is an issue. I wouldn't place any emphasis on it till others start saying it as well.
Just to clarify, I agree, but I wouldn't say performance, I'd say CPU performance. They are definitely doubling onboard GPU performance each cycle which is awesome for ultrabooks/tablets and stuff.
If Haswell can get total platform power down enough for 8 hours of battery life, ARM is going to have a bad time competing.
He draw that conclusion from those leaked x87 superPi benchmarks, all pretty much useless in today's world.
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6355/intels-haswell-architecture/6
I mean why would they improve/change so much stuff and there wont be any perf. boost.. It doesnt make any sense, even less to judge it on those 3 leaked benchmarks.

Yeah, but even in the Reddit IAMI the Intel engineer said that it was going to be a minimal performance increase, similar to that of Sandy--->Ivy which is about 10-15% clock for clock in general usage.
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Apparently the USB3.0 controller has an issue with waking up...
Also, the performance figures, clock vs clock to Ivy, isn't all that inspiring. There was a greater benefit going from Sandy to Ivy clock vs clock. The only thing that may make Haswell perform better is AVX2, for programs that can make use of it and support it.
Yes in x87 code it won't be any faster..
In normal use x86, no tests yet, it will be more then SB to IB.. All those new registers and wider engine executions will help a lot.