Intel’s new Haswell architecture is en route.

And its performance gains are about the same as those seen in the move from the Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge architectures.

A profile of a performance test of a prototype Core i7 Haswell chip by the mighty Tom’s Hardware suggests that it will offer a 7 percent to 13 percent performance gain over equivalent Ivy Bridge CPUs—a similar gain to that experienced with the move from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge.

The integrated HD 4600 GPU experiences an impressive speed boost of almost 30 percent, but the website noted that this still won’t allow for comfortable gaming on HD monitors, so gamers will need discrete graphics chips.

While performance gains reached up to 75 percent in the case of some specific tasks, the gains for typical desktop applications are relatively modest.

Stay tuned for additional details as they become available.