Intel’s Next Gen Haswell CPU and GPU Details Revealed

Intel’s Ivy Bridge replacement, due in Q2 2013 in both desktop and mobile versions, is codenamed Haswell. It will be a ‘Tock’ processor in Intel’s Tick Tock product development strategy, meaning a major launch featuring significant improvements over the current architecture. In terms of raw CPU power, Haswell is expected to have an Instruction Per Clock (IPC) improvement of about 15% and will introduce the AVX2 instruction set. If 15% doesn’t sound like all that much, then perhaps it’s because of Intel’s current focus on reducing power requirements and continued lack of head-to-head competition from AMD.

Built on the current 22nm Tri-Gate 3D transistor process, Haswell will head up the Shark Bay platform and be compatible with the Lynx Point chipset. Desktop versions will come in dual and quad core variants with TDP ranging from 65W to 95W and come with the GT2 graphics core. Intel will later release a cheaper Core i3 dual core model with the GT1 graphics core and 35W TDP.

Haswell’s GT2, and GT3 graphics cores will support DirectX 11.1, OpenGL 4.x and OpenCL 1.2 with display output options being VGA, DisplayPort, DVI and HDMI. Apparently, the highest end ‘Ultra’ Haswells won’t support VGA, but this remains to be seen. Performance is rumoured to be around three times that of the current HD 4000, presumably from the GT3 GPU core.