Details of Intel Haswell microarchitecture leaked

Some preliminary information about about Intel's "Shark Bay" platform and "Haswell" processor core, the next generation after Ivy Bridge, surfaced on the net. Where Ivy Bridge will have 2 platforms, Chief River for the mobile platform and Maho Bay for the desktop platform, Haswell has Shark Bay for both. As you might expect, it also offers a performance boost, although it uses the same 22nm trigate technology.

Haswell is expected to offer a 20% per core performance boost over Ivy Bridge, as well as greater integration and reduced power consumption. According to VR-Zone "the performance improvements are expected to be limited to increased instruction per cycle parallelism with new execution ports and better prefetching and branch handling for per-thread performance improvement, as well as AVX2 improvements like fused multiply add (which doesn't always speed up things) with doubled cache bandwidth to feed all that".

Haswell has, of course, got it's own chipset, called "Lynx Point". The mobile and Desktop platforms will have this on a separate chip, as with previous platforms, but the Ultra Low Power chips (ultrabook) will have the chipset integrated into the processor. The ultrabook chips will have only 2 cores, while the mobile processors will have 4 and the desktop processors will have 2 or 4 cores. The processors will support Hyperthreading, but it's unclear at this time which parts it will be enabled for.

The improvements with integration include having the VRMs fully integrated into the CPU, a great help to the power design, as well as overclockers. Additionally, the display ports will be on the CPU die, removing the need for external I/O hubs. This will simply the manufacture of motherboards and systems, as there is no longer a need for VRMs on the board, and HDMI/DisplayPort connectors being fed directly from the CPU. Only VGA will be handled by the Lynx Point chipset. This leaves more room on the chipset for implementing interfaces such as USB, SATA3 and LAN. The IGP will come in 3 performance oriented versions, GT1-GT3. The desktop version will have versions up to GT2, but the mobile and ultrabook versions will have versions up to GT3. It is beyond me why desktop processors have the slowest graphics options.

Haswell also indicated a return to Dual-Channel DDR3. The ultrabook processors support DDR3-L (1.35V) and LPDDR3 (1.2V). Mobile processors support DDR3-L, and desktop processors support DDR3 and DDR3-L. All processors look like they support 1600MHz memory.

The idle power consumption is significantly reduced, something which will benefit untold numbers of consumers who leave their computer idle, as well as benefitting users of low power, portable devices. TDP for the ultrabook processors is 15W. For the mobiles it's 37/47/57W, and the desktop has TDP of 35/45/65/95W.

All these changes mean we also have a new pinout. Haswell processors on the desktop will come in an LGA 1150 scket (socket H3). The ultrabook processors will be in a BGA package, and the mobiles will be BGA or rPGA-947 (socket G3).