Intel's Haswell Architecture Analyzed: Building a New PC and a New Intel
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 5, 2012 2:45 AM ESTFinal Words
After the show many seemed to feel like Intel short changed us at this year's IDF when it came to architecture details and disclosures. The problem is perspective. Shortly after I returned home from the show I heard an interesting comparison: Intel detailed quite a bit about an architecture that wouldn't be shipping for another 9 months, while Apple wouldn't say a thing about an SoC that was shipping in a week. That's probably an extreme comparison given that Apple has no motivation to share details about A6 (yet), but even if you compare Intel's openness at IDF to the rest of the chip makers we cover - there's a striking contrast. We'll always want more from Intel at IDF, but I do hope that we won't see a retreat as the rest of the industry seems to be ok with non-disclosure as standard practice.
There are three conclusions that have to be made when it comes to Haswell: its CPU architecture, its platform architecture and what it means for Intel's future. Two of the three look good from my perspective. The third one is not so clear.
Intel's execution has been relentless since 2006. That's over half a decade of iterating architectures, as promised, roughly once a year. Little, big, little, big, process, architecture, process, architecture, over and over again. It's a combination of great execution on the architecture side combined with great enabling by Intel's manufacturing group. Haswell will continue to carry the torch in this regard.
The Haswell micro-architecture focuses primarily on widening the execution engine that has been with us, moderately changed, for the past several years. Increasing data structures and buffers inside the processor helps to feed the beast, as does a tremendous increase in cache bandwidth. Support for new instructions in AVX2 via Intel's TSX should also pave the way for some big performance gains going forward. Power consumption is also a serious target for Haswell given that it must improve performance without dramatically increasing TDP. There will be slight TDP increases across the board for traditional form factors, while ultra portables will obviously shift to lower TDPs. Idle power drops while active power should obviously be higher than Ivy Bridge.
You can expect CPU performance to increase by around 5 - 15% at the same clock speed as Ivy Bridge. Graphics performance will see a far larger boost (at least in the high-end GT3 configuration) of up to 2x vs. Intel's HD 4000 in a standard voltage/TDP system. GPU performance in Ultrabooks will increase by up to 30% over HD 4000.
As a desktop or notebook microprocessor, Haswell looks very good. The architecture remains focused and delivers a sensible set of improvements over its predecessor.
As a platform, Haswell looks awesome. While the standard Haswell parts won't drive platform power down considerably, the new Haswell U/ULT parts will. Intel is promising a greater than 20x reduction in platform idle power and it's planning on delivering it by focusing its power reduction efforts beyond Intel manufactured components. Haswell Ultrabooks and tablets will have Intel's influence in many (most?) of the components placed on the motherboard. And honestly, this is something Intel (or one of its OEMs) should have done long ago. Driving down platform power is a problem that extends beyond the CPU or chipset, and it's one that requires a holistic solution. With Haswell, Intel appears committed to delivering that solution. It's not for purely altruistic reasons, but for the survival of the PC. I remember talking to Vivek about an iPad as a notebook replacement piece he was doing a while back. The biggest advantage the iPad offered over a notebook in his eyes? Battery life. Even for light workloads today's most power efficient ultraportable notebooks can't touch a good ARM based tablet. Haswell U/ULT's significant reduction in platform power is intended to fix that. I don't know that we'll get to 10+ hours of battery life on a single charge, but we should be much better off than we are today.
Connected standby is coming to PCs and it's a truly necessary addition. Haswell's support of active idle states (S0ix) is a game changer for the way portable PCs work. The bigger concern is whether or not the OEMs and ISVs will do their best to really take advantage of what Haswell offers. I know one will, but will the rest? Intel's increasingly hands on approach to OEM relations seems to be its way of ensuring we'll see Haswell live up to its potential.
Haswell, on paper, appears to do everything Intel needs to evolve the mobile PC platform. What's unclear is how far down the TDP stack Intel will be able to take the architecture. Intel seems to believe that TDPs below 8W are attainable, but it's too early to tell just how low Haswell can go. It's more than likely that Intel knows and just doesn't want to share at this point. I don't believe we'll see fanless Haswell designs, but Broadwell is another story entirely.
There's no diagram for where we go from here. Intel originally claimed that Atom would service an expanded range of TDPs all the way up to 10W. With Core architectures dipping below 10W, I do wonder if that slide was a bit of misdirection. I wonder if, instead, the real goal is to drive Core well into Atom territory. If Intel wants to solve its ARM problem, that would appear to be a very good solution.
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dishayu - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
I derived immense pleasure reading the article. Thank you, Anand. Big ups for the comprehensive read.My thoughts :
I think Intel really dropped the ball by not having unlinked clocks for each core, like qualcomm has for it's s4 pro processors. There are so many times that, for instance, i have a page open with some animated GIFs. They are strictly single thread processes and they won't let the processor go to idle state. And this is a very VERY common occurance that can IMO, only be solved by adopting unlocked states for each core. 3 cores can stay in sleep state (almost perpetually) and the processor runs on a single core with lowered frequency. THAT would be power efficient.
dagamer34 - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
Uhh... isn't turning off unused cores and overclocking the 4th core within TDP to perform single threaded tasks exactly what Turbo Boost introduced in Sandy Bridge is?know of fence - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
Reducing power is great and also inevitable, but Intel's move to compete against everything and everybody is alarming. With everyone trying to follow/please Apple, that means nothing good for the consumer, throw-away luxury electronics for exceptionally well groomed masses.Also, isn't it too early to be hyping this stuff?
A5 - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
Intel has to compete against ARM to keep them from taking over the "good-enough" computing space.As for the rest of it, you're not making any sense.
jjj - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
The ARM problem is not about the product but about price, long term the CPU/SoC ASP will drop hard ,there is competition now. Servers will keep them on life support for a while but without fundamental changes to their business model they can't make it.Intel should remember how they won the market .
dishayu - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
It's about both. Intel does not have sufficinetly low power parts at all, regardless the price point.mrdude - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
Regardless of whether they step foot into that end of the spectrum or not (and by Anand's analysis that's more likely with Broadwell and on?), they still need to compete on price.It's one thing to make a chip, it's quote another to make it competitive with respect to pricing. What works against a distant AMD won't work against ARM.
DesDizzy - Sunday, October 7, 2012 - link
I agree. This seems to be something that most people overlook when addressing the Wintel monopoly. The costs of Wintel products are high within the PC/Laptop space. The price of ARM/Apps are cheap within the Smartphone/Tab space. How do Wintel square this circle without damaging their business model?Krysto - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
You may not agree with Charlie, Anand, but reality seems to agree with him:http://www.techradar.com/news/computing/apple/appl...
I really don't know how you can think Apple would ever start using Intel chips in their iPads when Apple has already proven they want to make their own chips with A6.
Also, according to Charlie, Haswell will be like 40% more expensive than IVB. Atom tablets already seem to start at like $800. So I wish Intel good luck with that. Ultrabooks and Win8 hybrids won't drop down in price any time soon.
http://semiaccurate.com/2012/10/03/oems-call-intel...
Penti - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
I don't know how you could fail so much in reading comprehension, Anand only said the same flying spaghetti monster-damn form factor. Nothing else. There also must be an ecosystem, but if you can run the same app on a tablet as well as a desktop on x86 with more performance then ARM why wouldn't you see vendors use it. It is a full system even capable of building itself. It's not about killing ARM. Intel still uses it, they need fairly high-performance RISC chips for stuff like baseband. They had a large markets in smart-phones before 2006 and they made the choice to sell it because they had Atom in their lineup. They didn't forget about it.It's Microsoft tablets that costs 500-900 dollars even on Atom, but they only need to compete with Windows RT which is totally retarded as far as corporate customers go and not the same system as 8 Pro, doesn't run the same software. An Android tablet could use a Z2460 (and coming Z2580, after that Valleyview SoC's) and build a 240 dollar tablet. There is no price difference to be had as far as hardware is concerned. Windows 8 tablets are a whole other form factor and device to begin with. Most will have keyboard and multitouch trackpad.
He only talks about the same form factor, size and battery life here. In the Microsoft ecosystem there is really no reason to go to Windows RT powered ARM-devices which doesn't have better performance and runs no third party desktop (Win32/Full Windows SDK) software. It also lacks the same features in other areas which makes them devices instead of general computing platforms. Remember they offer both here. Hell the built in email is even worse then the one built into Android since version 3.0 or so, it's a lot worse then Third party mail-clients in Android, it's worse then mail-clients in Blackberry 10, Symbian, iOS and so on. If your replacing a desktop your not going with ARM here, not on a Windows device at least, Anand only talks about a new bread of DTR Tablets and Ultra-portables that will fit in the same form factor and battery life scenarios as ARM-tablets. Apple certainly don't need to participate here.
Intel certainly has sales to be made if they move Haswell down to low-power Atom territory when it comes out later next year. They could be used as the only computing device you have (smartphone + hybrid tablet-pc). Replacing desktops, ARM/ATOM-tablets, media PCs for your TV (just stream with Miracast). Et cetera. ARM-devices would just be cheaper less capable devices there. But it's still different targets. Haswell still targets server (enterprise-market), desktop, notebooks with larger form-factor/power-usage, as well as more portable stuff. Atom is still for the handheld stuff you use with one hand. ARM has moved quiet fast but they have no reason to target high-performance applications or built 100W SoC's that is fast without parallel computing. Applications like high-performance routers for example still uses licensed and custom MIPS and PowerPC chips. There are plenty of markets where a full feature ARM Cortex or x86 won't work either. ARM is just moving into the multimedia-field, replacing customs architectures in TV's, displacing MIPS, PPC etc. If Apple builds a very large custom CPU-architecture compatible with ARM ISA for workstations, notebooks etc they will just be in the same position they were with PowerPC and have to compete with the high-performance chips that most can't compete with, even with much larger resources then Apple. Apple and Samsung has no reason in doing so outside handheld devices, low-power servers, consumer oriented routers, streaming media boxes which leaves plenty of room for Intel and all the rest. Plus WiFi and wireless baseband in a huge market in of it self and it doesn't matter what the application processor architecture is. Stuff like ARM has competed because you could replace previous products with it easily, thus taking some of the SoC-market away from other, but that coincides with the choice to do so.