With punters buying laptops and tablets in droves, will Intel bother to make faster desktop CPUs?
One word: Haswell. That's what the foreseeable future's about for Intel CPUs. However, you could also argue that the word should be 'mobile', because that's what Haswell is all about.
Haswell, of course, is Intel's next big CPU architecture upgrade. As we write these words, it's precisely a month from launch. It's a major upgrade in architectural terms but manufactured on an existing production node - in this case 22nm - and like pretty much every new CPU architecture from Intel since the Pentium M Banias chip appeared just over 10 years ago, Haswell majors in mobility. To get Intel's take, we hooked up with Adam King, Intel's director of notebook product marketing.
According to King, it comes down to key advances in battery life, form factors and graphics.“Haswell delivers the largest generational leap in battery life in Intel's history," he says. "It's bigger even than the transition from Pentium 4 to Pentium M."
The lower power profile doesn't just mean better battery life; it also opens the door to new form factors. Kings says the market for two-in-one machines that combine tablet form factors with true desktop PC processing and pukka multi-tasking capabilities is set to explode.
The final major piece of the Haswell puzzle is graphics. Intel has just launched a new brand name for its graphics. From now on, the top performing Intel graphics will be known as Iris. "We're so proud of what we've achieved with our new graphics, we've given it a brand name for the first time.”King says.
What exactly are these achievements? Up to three times the performance of Intel's fastest HD4000 graphics, as found in the Ivy Bridge generation of Core i5 and Core i7 processors. This first iteration of Iris is largely a carry-over in terms of graphics architecture. However, the execution unit count has been upped from 16 to 40 units in the most powerful models. An optional version with a slice of embedded eDRAM memory, thought to total 128MB, is the one capable of those 3x performance numbers.
Haswell on the desktop
Haswell is clearly major step forward, but what benefit will it bring to the desktop? In terms of raw CPU power, the answer is not much. Intel is sticking with four cores on its mainstream socket.
The problem is that Intel has already snagged all the low-hanging fruit in terms of improving the performance of its CPU cores. You can only make major transitions like bringing the memory controller on die once, so now it's faced with making changes to its CPU core design.
What’s more, the quest for clock speed died long ago. The reality then, is that the pure CPU performance of Haswell will almost definitely be an incremental step. Intel could fix that by throwing a few more cores into the mix. Sadly, increasing the CPU performance of mainstream desktop PCs is no longer much of apriority.
That said, Intel will continue to rev up its high-end processors on the LGA 2.011 socket. Ivy Bridge-E chips are due out in September. The bad news is that it looks like Intel will continue to disable two cores, making Ivy Bridge-E a six-core part. That includes the top Core i7-4960X chip. We'll all have to wait until Haswell-E turns up to with an eight-core Intel processor.
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