We are still waiting for the launch of Intel’s first 22nm processor Ivy Bridge that will be released in March-April 2012, and Intel has now revealed that the design for the successor Haswell is finished. As usual the goal is still far away, since it is time to evaluate and bug search.
Haswell is Intel’s coming architecture to replace Ivy Bridge in 2013 and will be built on 22nm. According to the very sparse details that are available Haswell will be a SoC with CPU, GPU, northbridge and southbridge on the same silicon. Intel has also said that graphics performance will be good and that discrete graphcis cards will no longer be necessary in notebooks.
The design for Intel Haswell has been completed. What this means is that it has set the look of the processor architecture, and that it will not make amends to what was first planned if it is not absolutely necessary. Haswell is up for some hard tests in Intel’s labs, with several new revisions and steppings coming to remove bugs. Judging from this it looks like Intel will not have any problems to fit Haswell in its Tick-Tock schematic.
While Intel is keeping a tight lid on the details of Haswell that is sitll about 18 months into the future it has released one detail that is worth mentioning. It has put a large focus on power consumption at standby, something Intel thinks is an important component in future mobility and its Ultrabook concept.
With Sandy Bridge it raised performance over Nehalem/Westmere but also put a large focus on energy efficiency, and Haswell will not surprisingly follow down the same path. Energy consumpton at standby has dropped with 30% over current Intel processors, and as a platform with all of its components will be “more than 20 times” lower.
This will enable “more than 10 days” of connected standby. The idea behind this is that while the computer is almost asleep it will continuously fetch information from the cloud. Email, IMs, twitter and more will be updated when you open the lid and this sounds quite interesting for those travelling a lot or “always on the go”.
