Intel’s Haswell Processor to be Overclocker’s Best Friend?

Intel has been showing a prototype of the Haswell-EP platform, called Grantley to a lucky few in the press. Intel will be bringing out higher TDP processors for this platform, packing up to 16 cores, with the CPUs being available at different clock speeds and with different amounts of enabled cores. All of them will exceed the 95W TDP envelope of Sandy Bridge (the new Ivy Bridge TDP is 77W). According to Intel, these CPUs will come in at 120W, 135W, 145W and 160W TDP. This will require some heavy duty cooling to cope with it, especially in hot countries.

Such high power draws require dedicated four and five rail power lines to feed these monsters, with the prototype on show running at less than 100 amps under ‘typical’ workloads. However, Turbo Mode made the current consumption hit 120 amps. The real jewel in the crown though, is that Haswell silicon is designed to work at up to 190 amps with just air cooling! This may make for new overclocking champions under LN2, allowing power use to hit a massive 300W or so. The new platform also supports 8 lanes of DDR3 or DDR4 memory. Product availability is due possibly in late 2013 at the earliest, but 2014 is much more likely.