Hi JPM - and anyone else that wants to pitch in, of course!
I read an article on Anandtech recently that was talking about Intel's first big symposium on Haswell . . . the point of this post being, that they mentioned there will not be much of a performance improvement on the CPU side over what is out now - I think they were saying like 10% or around there. So it will be essentially like an Ivy Bridge update over a Sandy Bridge. That wasn't exactly much, especially considering how high the SB overclocks! Apparently huge strides are being made in this next-gen CPU, but mostly all on the built-in GPU side of things.
Now for my question: Why should we care about Haswell, etc - if the big improvements are in the onboard GPU and not on the CPU side? Or is there more to it than that? Like increased RAM, BUS timings, better chipsets, etc - that would result in the CPU feeding the GPUs faster or more efficiently than our CPUs do now?
Lastly, do you think the onboard GPUs built in to Haswell and future Intel chips will be powerful enough to crunch with? Or would that even be a consideration, given the insane heat GPUs put off? If I had the choice, I would rather NOT have the GPU built in, simply for heat exchange purposes if nothing else. Crunching on an internal GPU (if possible) must severely hamper the CPU crunching due to power consumption and heat output.
Thanks for any discussion.
EDIT: Found the Article on Haswell here.