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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
245 Comments
View All Comments
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
It's the other way around: not talking about Apple using Intel in iPads, but rather Apple ditching Intel in the MacBook Air.I do agree with Charlie in that there's a lot of pressure within Apple to move more designs away from Intel and to something home grown. I suspect what we'll see is the introduction of new ARM based form factors that might slowly shift revenue away from the traditional Macs rather than something as simple as dropping an Ax SoC in a MacBook Air.
Take care,
Anand
A5 - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
Yeah. I knew what you were getting at, but I guess it wasn't that obvious for some people :-p.Something like an iPad 3 with an Apple-made keyboard case + some changes in iOS would make Intel and notebook OEMs really scared.
tipoo - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
So pretty much the Surface tablet. The keyboard case looks amazing, can't wait to try one.Kevin G - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
Apple is in the unique position that they could go with either platform way. They are capable of moving iOS to x86 or OS X to ARM on seemingly a whim. Their decision would be dictated not by current and chips arriving in the short term (Haswell and the Cortex A15) but rather long term road maps. Apple would be willing ditch their own CPU design if it brought a clear power, performance and process advantage from what they could do themselves. The reason why Apple manufactured an ARM chip themselves is that they couldn't get the power and performance out of SoC's from other companies.The message Intel wants to send to Apple is that Haswell (and then Broadwell) can compete in the ultra mobile market. Intel also knows the risk to them if Apple sticks to ARM: Apple is the dominate player in the tablet market and one of the major players in the cell phone market and pretty much the only success in the utlrabook segment. Apple's success is eating away the PC market which is Intel's bread and butter in x86 chip sales. So for the moment Intel is actively promoting Apple's competitors in the ultrabook segment and assist in 10W Ivy Bridge and 10W Haswell tablet designs.
If Intel can't get anyone to beat Apple, they might as well join them over the long run. This would also explain Intel toying with the idea of becoming a foundry. If Intel doesn't get their x86 chips into the iPad/iPhone, they might as well manufacture the ARM chips that do. Apple is also one of the few companies who would be willing to pay a premium for Intel foundry access (and the extra ARM not x86 premium).
So there are four scenarios that could play out in the long term: the status quo of x86 for OS X + ARM for iOS, x86 for both OS X + iOS, ARM for both OS X + iOS and ARM built by Intel for OS X + iOS.
Peanutsrevenge - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
I will LMAO if Apple switch macs back to RISC in the next few years.Will be RISC, x86, RISC in the space of a decade.
Poor Crapple users having to keep swapping their software.
I laughed 6 ago, and I'll laugh again :D
Kevin G - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link
But it wouldn't be the same RISC. ARM isn't PowerPC.And hey, Apple did go from CISC to RISC to back to CISC again for their Macs.
Penti - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link
They hardly would want to be in the situation where they have to compete with Intel and Intel's performance again. Also their PC/Mac lineup is just so much smaller then the mobile market they have, why would they create teams of thousands of engineers (which they don't have) to create workstation processors for their mobile workstations and mac pro's? They couldn't really do that with PowerPC design despite having influence on chip architecture, they lost out in the race and just grows more dependent on other external suppliers and those Macs would loose the ability to run Boot camp'd or virtualized Windows. It's not the same x86 as it was in 2006 either.A switch would turn Macs into toys rather then creative and engineering tools. It would create an disadvantage with all the tools developed for x86 and if they drop high-end they might as well turn themselves into an mobile computing company and port their development tools to Windows. As it's not like they will replace all the client and server systems in the world or even aspire to.
I don't have anything against ARM creping into desktops. But they really has no reason to segment their system into ARM or x86. It's much easier to keep the iOS vs OS X divide.
Haswell will give you ARM or Atom (Z2760) battery life for just some hundred dollars more or so. If they can support the software better those machine will be loaded with software worth thousands of dollar per machine/user any way. Were the weaker machines simply can't run most of that. Casual users can still go with Atom if they want something weaker/cheaper or another ecosystem altogether.
Kevin G - Monday, October 8, 2012 - link
The market is less about performance now as even taking a few steps backward a user has a 'good enough' performance. It is about gaining mobility which is driven by reduction in power consumption.Would Apple want to compete with Intel's Xeon's line up? No and well, Apple isn't even trying to stay on the cutting edge there (their Mac Pro's are essentially a 3 year old design with moderate processor speed bumps in 2010 and 2012). If Apple was serious about performance here, they'd have a dual LGA 2011 Xeon as their flagship system. The creative and engineering types have been eager for such a system which Apple has effectively told them to look elsewhere for such a workstation.
With regards to virtualization, yes it would be a step backward not to be able to run x86 based VM's but ARM has defined their own VM extensions. So while OS X would lose the ability to host x86 based Windows VM's, their ARM hardware could native run OS X with an iOS guest, an Android guest or a Windows RT guest. There is also brute force emulation to get the job done if need be.
Moving to pure ARM is a valid path for iOS and OS X is a valid path for Apple though it is not their only long term option.
Penti - Tuesday, October 9, 2012 - link
You will not be able to license Windows RT at all as an end-user. Apple has no interest what so ever to support GNU/Linux based ARM-VMs.I'm sure they will update the Mac Pro the reason behind it is largely thanks to Intel themselves. That's not their only workstation though, and yes performance is important in the mobile (notebook space), performance per watt is really important too. If they want mobile workstations and engineering type machines they won't go with ARM. As it does mean they would have to compete with Intel. They could buy a firm with an x86 license and outdo Intel if they were really capable of that. ISA doesn't really matter here expect when it comes to tools.
baba264 - Friday, October 5, 2012 - link
"Within 8 years many expect all mainstream computing to move to smartphones, or whatever other ultra portable form factor computing device we're carrying around at that point."I don't know if I am in a minority or what, but I really don't see myself giving up my desktop anytime soon. I love my mechanical keyboard my large screen and my computing power. So I have to wander if I'm just an edge case or if analyst are reading too much in the rise of the smartphone.
Great article otherwise :).