Intel has unveiled details of its new
Haswell microarchitecture, and promises that it will deliver greatly improved compute and graphics performance, drastically lower power requirements, and developer-friendly improvements when chips based on it appear next year, branded as Intel 4th Generation Core Processors.
"Haswell will be the foundation of a family of products, just like
Sandy Bridge and
Ivy Bridge were," said Ronak Singhal, Intel Senior Principal Engineer," at one of those sessions.
"The first thing to keep in mind about Haswell is that it is a converged core," he said. "Converged core means that we scale products that go all the way from high-end servers all the way down to low-power form factors like tablets, using the same core."
The same core means that developers can apply the same techniques to each iteration of the Haswell chip, since at their most basic levels their arcitectures are in common. "The important thing from a developer's perspective," Singhal said, "is that since we have a converged architecture across all of these segments, you can develop and optimize once, and then scale back across these other products."
Intel Fellow Per Hammarlund agreed. "You might scratch your head and think we're nuts, trying to have the same core from tablets to servers," he told the assembled übergeeks. "But in reality, if you think about it, the power levels that you have with just a few cores in a tablet at a very low power are very simlar to the power and power-efficiency requirements you have in tens of cores in a high-end server."
Of course, as important as developers are to Intel, the company also knows that a converged core architecture adds to their own bottom line. "It's actually good for us from a stingy point of view," said Hammarlund, referring to the advantages of the modularity inherent in a converged-core architecture.
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