Want to sample the future of Intel's processors? Well, the small-but-powerful chips, code-named Haswell, won't ship until mid-2013, but today Intel revealed more details on the fourth-generation of its Core CPUs. On the wish list for the chip family are diminished heat output, improved performance, and lower rates of power consumption, all with a CPU that takes up a smaller footprint.
According to Intel's keynote presentation, Haswell succeeds in all of the above. Designed with a 22-nanometer architecture, the chip already offers a diminished footprint. Plus, Intel boasted during the presentation that Haswell will save 20 times more power in standby mode than the third-generation version of Core CPUs currently powering millions of laptops.
Intel also told The Verge last week that Haswell chips will require less cooling power from notebooks than existing Core processors. The estimate was about a 10-watt thermal design point as opposed to a 17-watt TDP, TDP being a form a measurement used to determine how much cooling power a notebook must provide to keep chips from overheating.
Intel also expects Haswell to excel in graphics power. To illustrate the chip's prowess over the current generation of processors, Intel displayed a DX11 demo using side-by-side video with one screen rendering video from a third-generation Intel Core CPU and the other showing video from a PC system with Haswell inside. The expectation is that Haswell will deliver twice the graphics performance.
The last portion of the demo involved showing off the new chip family's low power consumption. According to another side-by-side comparison, Haswell ran at 50% of the power of the current generation CPU. Look for more information on Intel's Haswell chips as IDF 2012 continues.
