Intel Corp. (INTC) has dropped a few hints to its upcoming 22 nm Haswell architecture, currently under development by the company's secret Oregon team. In a post on the Intel Software Network blog titled "Haswell New Instruction Descriptions Now Available!", the company reveals that it plans to launch the new CPU in 2013.
Haswell will utilize the same power-saving tri-gate 3D transistor technology that will first drop with Ivy Bridge in early 2012. Major changes architecturally reportedly include a totally redesigned cache, fused multiply add (FMA3) instruction support, and an on-chip vector coprocessor.
The vector process, which will work with the on-die GPU, was a major focus of the post. The company is preparing a series of commands called Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), which will speed up vector math. It writes:
Intel AVX addresses the continued need for vector floating-point performance in mainstream scientific and engineering numerical applications, visual processing, recognition, data-mining/synthesis, gaming, physics, cryptography and other areas of applications. Intel AVX is designed to facilitate efficient implementation by wide spectrum of software architectures of varying degrees of thread parallelism, and data vector lengths.
According to CNET, Intel's marketing chief Tom Kilroy indicates that Intel hopes for the new chip's integrated graphics to rival today's discrete graphics.
Intel has a ways to go to meet that objective -- its on-die GPU in Sandy Bridge marked a significant improvement over past designs (which were housed in a separate package, traditionally), however it also fell far short of the GPU found in Advance Micro Devices (AMD) Llano Fusion APUs.
Intel has enjoyed a love/hate relationship with graphics makers AMD and NVIDIA Corp. (NVDA). While it's been forced to allow their GPUs to live on its motherboards and alongside its CPUs, the company has also fantasized of usurping the graphics veterans. Those plans culminated in the company's Larrabee project, which aimed to offer discrete Intel graphics cards.
Now that a commercial release of Larrabee has been cancelled, Intel has seized upon on-die integrated graphics as its latest answer to try to push NVIDIA and AMD out of the market. Intel is promoting heavily the concept of ultrabooks -- slender notebooks like the Apple, Inc.'s (AAPL) MacBook Air or ASUTEK Computer Inc.'s (TPE:2357) UX21, which feature low voltage CPUs and -- often -- no discrete GPU.
Mr. Kilroy reportedly wants ultrabook manufacturers using Haswell to shoot for target and MSRP of $599 USD, which would put them roughly in line with this year's Llano notebooks from AMD and partners. It's about $100 USD less than current Sandy Bridge notebooks run.
Intel faces pressure from a surging ARM Holdings plc's (ARMH) who is looking to unveil notebook processors sometime next year.
