SAN FRANCISCO – Longer battery life and better graphics lead a laundry list of improvements in Intel’s next-generation CPU, Haswell. Intel described its first new architecture for its 22-nm tri-gate transistor process at its annual developer forum here.
Two- and four-core client versions of Haswell will ship in PCs by April, said Dadi Perlmutter, general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, in a keynote address here. He showed early versions of the chip running in prototype systems at less than 8W on jobs that drew more than 17W on Intel’s existing Sandy Bridge CPUs.
"A lot of the consumer impact will be in significantly longer battery life and better graphics performance," said Kevin Krewell, senior analyst with The Linley Group (Mountain View, Calif.) and editor of
Microprocessor Report. "But a lot of the real benefits in the CPU won't come until you optimize and compile for the chip’s enhanced AVX2 code," he said.
The architecture will serve a broader range of systems than any previous Intel CPU, extending from fanless tablets to high-end servers. A new ultra-low active power state called S0ix leads a handful of power management advances in Haswell, enabling a 20-fold reduction in idle power
"When a Haswell platform is doing little work, it is almost always in this new state," said Per Hammarlund, an Intel Fellow.
Haswell also transitions between high and low power states faster than existing x86 chips. In addition, it uses new low power modes for interfaces such as Serial ATA, PCI Express and USB.
Haswell runs at less than 8W on jobs that require more than 17W on Intel's current CPUs.