Posted on Friday, May 03 2013 @ 13:19 CEST by Thomas De Maesschalck
David Kanter takes a close look at the upcoming Intel Haswell SoC for ARS Technica, you can read his analysis
over here.
The Haswell family encompasses a new CPU core, a new GPU, and numerous system-level changes. More importantly, it marks the beginning of Intel's more unified approach to SoCs. The Haswell family is really a set of building blocks that architects will assemble for specific markets. The Haswell CPU core is a step forward in performance (as is to be expected from Intel) but more importantly, it is a huge step down in power. This SoC should be viable for high-end tablets. Variants of Haswell are aimed as low as 10W, and future improvements may reduce this further. Intel’s 22nm FinFET node is necessary to achieve this wider range, but it's not sufficient. Haswell's architecture fully exploits the benefits of the new process technology in a way that Ivy Bridge never did. It ultimately yields higher performance and lower power, which will translate into PCs and tablets that run faster with a longer battery life.
