The Verge - Intel Haswell CPU microarchitecture: news, rumors, leaks, and details

Intel's new 'Iris' integrated graphics are up to three times better than last year's versions

2013-05-02T03:00:05Z

When you're buying a new computer with performance in mind, integrated graphics are generally not the ones you want. Even though they've improved greatly over the years, "Intel HD Graphics" has become synonymous with "doesn't play things very well," continually lagging behind dedicated GPUs from the likes of AMD and Nvidia.

Now, Intel hopes to break the cycle and the naming association in one fell swoop. The company claims its new Intel "Iris" Graphics, embedded in upcoming Haswell CPUs, can offer double or triple the performance of the Intel HD Graphics 4000 that comes with current Ivy Bridge processors. That's significant: typically each generation offers only a double-digit percentage boost.

That doesn't mean every new Haswell...

Intel posts $13.5 billion revenue in Q4, but sees income drop 15 percent in 2012

2013-01-17T21:03:12Z

Intel has seen itself stuck in a difficult position as its primary business — PC processors — gets marginalized by the growth of smartphones and tablets powered by competitors' chips. The company is managing to keep up with expectations, however, as it revealed in its earnings report today that it earned a total of $3.2 billion on $13.5 billion in revenue during the quarter. While Intel may have met Wall Street's expectations, it is clear that it's feeling the effects of the decline in PC sales (despite the recent launch of Windows 8), and Intel knows it. CFO Stacy Smith admitted "the PC market segment was impacted by the growth of tablets." The company pulled in $400 million less than it did during the same period last year, and for...

Ultrabook, round two: can Intel control the future of the laptop?

2013-01-16T19:45:03Z

There aren't many companies that can set a new direction for the entire computer industry. Right now, three come to mind: PC manufacturers march to the beat of Microsoft's Windows drum, and many follow Apple's design. The third is Intel, which influences the market behind the scenes with ever more powerful processors and aggressive marketing campaigns.

In 2011, Intel told every PC manufacturer that it needed to have an answer to Apple's MacBook Air, and offered $300 million, among other persuasions, to help OEMs develop and market new designs. Intel called it the ultrabook, and specified a set of ultrabook requirements in terms of thickness, responsiveness, and battery life. The manufacturers complied. While some PC vendors champed at...

Intel's North Cape is a power-sipping, keyboard-detaching blueprint for Haswell PCs (hands-on)

2013-01-07T23:07:21Z

Intel’s fourth-generation Haswell processors were the focal point of the company’s presentation today, and with its North Cape reference design, Intel aims to show the public what it can expect from the new chips. The detachable Windows 8 tablet contains a separate battery in the keyboard for extra power, and the sub–10W design means that users can expect to get in the neighborhood of 13 hours of battery life. But North Cape also has some flashier tricks up its sleeve. Firstly, its electromechanical locking mechanism can be disengaged with a single finger. There's a key in the keyboard's top-right corner that unlocks the tablet from the keyboard — a patent-pending technology that Intel plans to license to OEMs. The crucial...

Intel unveils fourth-generation Intel Core processor with 'all-day battery life'

2013-01-07T20:56:25Z

Intel is launching its latest Intel Core processor today at CES 2013. Formerly known as Haswell, the latest Intel chip will bring all-day battery life to the latest ultrabooks. Intel says this will equate to around 9 hours of continuous battery life on new systems. This new chipset is designed for a new ultrabook detachable reference design codenamed North Cape that converts into a 10mm tablet which will run up to 13 hours while docked.

Intel showed off a reference design on stage that has a battery both underneath the keyboard and behind the display on a Core i5 / i7 system. Along with the new reference design, Intel says ultrabooks will require touch input for fourth-generation Core systems. Intel didn't provide exact timings on when...

Intel plans 10-watt Ivy Bridge processors for 2013, signaling longer battery life or thinner PCs

2012-12-04T04:01:58Z

If you want to build or buy an ultrathin laptop with Intel inside, you've got a difficult choice. Right now, you can pick between a powerful Core i3, i5 or i7 processor which might not make it through your average workday, or a comparatively weak Atom chip with an estimated 10 hours of battery life. If you're willing to wait until the middle of next year, though, there might be a third option. Intel's planning to drastically reduce the power consumption of its existing Ivy Bridge silicon architecture to a TDP (thermal profile) of just 10 watts.

Currently, the ultra-low voltage Ivy Bridge processors you'll find in thin laptops like Apple's MacBook Air have a 17-watt TDP, and though Intel already provides software that can tune them down...

Intel's power-efficient Haswell processor targets thinner laptops with new 10-watt TDP

2012-09-05T20:43:11Z

Intel's holding its annual developer conference next week, from September 11th through the 13th, and while a certain Cupertino computer company will undoubtedly dominate the news on day two, Intel will also have a few things to reveal. Chief among them is the firm's next-gen Haswell architecture, which is still on track for 2013. Well, actually, it's not merely on track: Intel tells us that at least one version of highly integrated system-on-chip is now slated to have a 10-watt TDP. "It's really the first product we're building from the ground up for ultrabook," a representative says.

What does that mean? Well, TDP ("thermal design point") refers to the amount of cooling a system requires to dissipate a chip's heat. Presently, Intel's...

Intel's 2013 Haswell microarchitecture to use transactional memory, increasing multi-core performance

2012-02-09T16:14:04Z

When Intel announced its Haswell next generation processor microarchitecture (the one after Ivy Bridge) in September of last year, it said that it would re-invent the notebook. We already knew that the 22nm platform would offer a 30 percent power savings over Sandy Bridge, and now the company has let loose a few more details: Haswell is going to use transactional memory, which Intel is calling Transactional Synchronization Extensions (TSX), to allow high performance on multicore processors while keeping the programming familiar for developers. As explained in an Intel blog post, without TSX the system locks shared resources when they're modified by a thread and prevents other threads from making changes until the lock is disengaged. The...