Posted on 09/23/2012 8:36:15 AM PDT by Ernest_at_the_Beach
"Haswell will be the first processor to be designed from the ground up to fully optimize the power savings and performance benefits from the move to 3D or tri-gate transistors on the 22nm process node. Improved graphics performance. Haswell is expected to double the graphics performance vs. Ivy Bridge processors bringing its performance on par with the $50 - $70 graphics cards," said Vivek Arya, an analyst with Merrill Lynch, in a note to clients, reports Tech Trader Daily.
The slow take-off of ultrabooks and all-in-one desktops this year is a result of not only slow economy, but also of emergence of new
Provided that Haswell is truly designed to take maximum advantage of tri-gate 22nm process technology, it will not only offer great power savings, but will also lower manufacturing costs of the chips, which will let Intel to sell them at lower price-points without sacrificing its own margins. That will likely give a boost to ultrabooks as well as change the economics of the
What will be interesting to see is whether Haswell and its successor Rockwell or Skylake and its successor Skymont will be the chips that will actually wed high-performance and flexibility of x86 with ultra-low power consumption and fixed-function functionality of custom system-on-chips. The chip that will be able to do this will be a true revolution.
Intel Haswell microprocessors for mainstream desktops and laptops will be structurally similar to existing Core i-series "Sandy Bridge" and "Ivy Bridge" chips and will continue to have two or four cores with Hyper-Threading technology along with graphics adapter that shares last level cache (LLC) with processing cores and works with memory controller via system agent. The processors that belong to the Haswell generation will continue to rely on dual-channel DDR3/DDR3L memory controller with DDR power gating support to trim idle power consumption. The chip will have three PCI Express 3.0 controllers, Intel Turbo Boost technology with further improvements and so on.
On the micro-architectural level the chip will be a lot dissimilar compared to available solutions. It is believed that the new Haswell x86 micro-architecture will be substantially different from existing, which will enable further scalability and performance increases. Besides, Haswell will support numerous new instructions, including AVX2, bit manipulation instructions, FPMA (floating point multiple accumulate) and others. The new graphics core based on Denlow architecture is projected to support such new features as DirectX 11.1, OpenGL 3.2+, to be substantially more powerful and to be certified to run numerous professional applications.
Intel Haswell chips also implement a number of aggressive measures to trim power consumption, including power aware interrupt routing for power/performance optimizations, configurable TDP and LPM, DDR power gating, power optimizer (CPPM) support, idle power improvements, latest power states, etc.
Intel did not comment on the news-story.
fyi
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