Intel's Haswell Architecture Analyzed: Building a New PC and a New Intel
by Anand Lal Shimpi on October 5, 2012 2:45 AM ESTOther Power Savings
Haswell's power savings come from three sources, all of which are equally important. We already went over the most unique: Intel's focus on reducing total platform power consumption by paying attention to everything else on the motherboard (third party controllers, voltage regulation, etc...). The other two sources of power savings are more traditional, but still very significant.
At the micro-architecture level Intel added more power gating and low power modes to Haswell. The additional power gating gives the power control unit (PCU) more fine grained control over shutting off parts of the core that aren't used. Intel published a relatively meaningless graph showing idle power for standard voltage mobile Haswell compared to the previous three generations of Core processors.
Haswell can also transition between power states approximately 25% faster than Ivy Bridge, which lets the PCU be a bit more aggressive in which power state it selects since the penalty of coming out of it is appreciably lower. It's important to put the timing of all of this in perspective. Putting the CPU cores to sleep and removing voltage/power from them even for a matter of milliseconds adds up to the sort of savings necessary to really enable the sort of always-on, always-connected behavior Haswell based systems are expected to deliver.
Intel has also done a lot of work at the process level to bring Haswell's power consumption down. As a tock, Haswell is the second micro-architecture to use Intel's new 22nm tri-gate transistors. The learnings from Ivy Bridge are thus all poured into Haswell. Intel wasn't too specific on what it did on the manufacturing side to help drive power down in Haswell other than to say that a non-insignificant amount of work came from the fabs.
The Fourth Haswell
At Computex Intel's Mooly Eden showed off this slide that positioned Haswell as a 15-20W part, while Atom based SoCs would scale up to 10W and perhaps beyond:
Just before this year's IDF Intel claimed that Haswell ULT would start at 10W, down from 17W in Sandy/Ivy Bridge. Finally, at IDF Intel showed a demo of Haswell running the Unigen Heaven benchmark at under 8W:
The chain of events tells us two things: 1) Intel likes to play its cards close to its chest, and 2) the sub-10W space won't be serviced by Atom exclusively.
Intel said Haswell can scale below 10W, but it didn't provide a lower bound. It's too much to assume Haswell would go into a phone, but once you get to the 8W point and look south you open yourself up to fitting into things the size of a third generation iPad. Move to 14nm, 10nm and beyond then it becomes more feasible that you could fit this class of architecture into something even more portable.
Intel is being very tight lipped about the fourth client Haswell (remember the first three were desktop, mobile and ultra-low-volt/Ultrabook) but it's clear that it has real aspirations to use it in a space traditionally reserved for ARM or Atom SoCs.
One of the first things I ever heard about Haswell was that it was Intel's solution to the ARM problem. I don't believe a 10W notebook is going to do anything to the ARM problem, but a sub-8W Haswell in an iPad 3 form factor could be very compelling. Haswell won't be fanless, but Broadwell (14nm) could be. And that could be a real solution to the ARM problem, at least outside of a phone.
As I said before, I don't see Haswell making it into a phone but that's not to say a future derivative on a lower power process wouldn't.
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random2 - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link
"The race to the bottom that we've seen in the LCD space made it unlikely that any of the panel vendors would be jumping at the opportunity to make their products more expensive."It's unfortunate, because of what might have been had the manufacturers, of which there are only three main ones, if I recall, had the foresight to market to customers that weren't just looking to buy the lowest priced panel on display at Best Buy. Had they the initiative to have started years ago, there would be some pretty fantastic panels available today for much more reasonable prices than seen for the 27 and 30 inch 2560X1600 panels today.
Klugfan - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link
This doesn't really belong in the Haswell article, but I would love to know more about the physics and constraints of TDP. Like, hit me with a chart of TDP impact for a variety of important parts in phones, tablets, laptops, and desktops. Show me a chart of TDP budgets and mitigation strategies. Explain to me roughly how physics forces those things to relate. Please.Seems important and it's easy to understand the comparison from Ivy Bridge to Haswell but that doesn't feel like the big picture.
havoti97 - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link
I read the 1st page then got bored. Writing style is overly wordy... am I the only the feeling this way?xeizo - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link
It's an article, not a twitter feed! Some of us like to get the whole picture not just the flashy stuff ....watersb - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link
Phenomenal feature, Anand! This is why I check your site each day. Thanks very much!bill4 - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link
like atom, you're stuck in no mans land. way too high for tablets and phones, but in desktops and laptop, who cares if the amd solution uses 30 watts instead of 8? that difference isn't enough to matter when you take the whole platform into account, especially at lower price points where battery life wont be fantastic anyway. on the dsktop it's completely pointless.JlHADJOE - Sunday, October 7, 2012 - link
On a laptop using 30 watts instead of 8 will more than triple your battery life, especially at lower price points/smaller form factors where manufacturers gimp the battery.How's about browsing for 9 hours instead of 3? Or 27 hours instead of 9? I'd jump on it in a heartbeat.
1008anan - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link
Haswell will sport 32 single precision or 16 double precision flops per cycle per core for its desktop and high tdp mobile skews [at least 30 watt and up].Can anyone speculate on how many single precision and double precision flops per cycle per core Haswell will execute for its low TDP skews? For example the less than 10 watt skews? the 15 watt skews?
I would also be interested in learning speculation about how many execution units (or shader cores if you prefer standard nomenclature) the low TDP Haswell products will have.
1008anan - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link
Haswell will be able to execute 16 double precision or 32 single precision flops per clock per core for desktop and high TDP mobile skews [at least 30 watts and up].Can anyone speculate on how many flops per cycle per core the sub 10 watt and 15 watt Haswell skews will execute? Similarly I would be interested in hearing speculation about how many graphic execution units (shader cores) the sub 10 watt and 15 watt Haswell products will come with. Any speculation on graphics clock speed?
Is it possible that the high end tock 22 nm Xeon server parts could have 32 double precision or 64 single precision flops per clock per core?
Laststop311 - Saturday, October 6, 2012 - link
Best explanation of haswell I've read to date. Good Job Anand.