The Chip Giant Plans to bring the pain
to competitors across the board next year
In The Coming Months, Intel partisans will get
two significant offerings: The biggest change will be the CPU known as Haswell.
It’s a tock’ in Intel’s so called tick tock
design parlance, and therefore a more substantial advance in processing.
Remember, the bigger leaps, or tocks, are offset from the manufacturing process
changes. So, while you might expect the debut of a smaller process to yield a
really butt kicking CPU, that’s not how the conservative company operates.
Intel instead pioneers a new process with a
modestly improved CPU a tick. “Only after the new process version is fully
vetted and working with that chip does Intel decide to push performance, with a
tock.” For example, the original groundbreaking Core 2 CPU was built on the
same existing and well tread 65nm process technology Intel had been using for
the Pentium 4. And when Intel, made the switch to 45nm, it debuted with a
conservative jump ahead with the Yorkfield and Wotfdale CPUs.
Haswell
is the successor to the Sandy Bridge
With its 3D 22nm CPUs now well proven in the
Ivy Bridge series of Core ix chips, Intel is going to swing for the fences with
Haswell. Also built on the 22nm process, Haswell features more transistors in
increasing parallelism for single threaded applications and more efficient
multithreaded code. But don’t think HaswelI, is going to a six-core CPU or an
eight core package like AMDs new Vishera, to say nothing of a 12 threaded
jobbie Like the Core i7-3960X. For its mainstream CPUs, Intel’s guiding principle
will be to push performance per-core rather than increase core or thread count.
So expect Haswell to come in the form of quad-core with Hyper-Threading,
quad-core without Hyper Threading. as well as dual-cores with HT on and off.
Lest you doubt that Intel can produce a
performance boost worthy of a tock” without increasing core or thread count.
Intel says it can by extracting more performance out of existing code and
making it easier to code for multicores. Haswell features deeper buffers, more
execution units, improved branch pre diction, increased internal L2 bandwidth,
and two sets of new instructions intended to increase performance.
Avx2
Just about every nerd knows that high performance
computing Loads can benefit greatly from the GPU’s inherent strengths in
processing many parallel tasks. Even Intel has finally taken graphics seriously
and its integrated graphics have gotten surprisingly powerful for not just
gaming, but also compute purposes. But old habits die hard and Intel apparently
doesn’t want to cede compute performance to the GPU just yet. As evidence,
Intel is introducing the new AVX2 instruction set. AVX2 essentially doubles the
performance per cycle over AVX in the original Sandy Bridge CPU. AVX2 won’t
just benefit supercomputer workloads; theoretically, it will also greatly
increase video encoding and gaming performance, as well.
Intel Tsx
The biggest brain bender of a feature in
Haswell may be the new transactional synchronization extensions, or TSX. TSX is
designed to make it far easier to write multithreaded code.
One example of where TSX is handy is in
changing values in a table. Imagine that you and your co-workers are
simultaneously editing, say, a spreadsheet. It doesn’t take too long to figure
out what happens when Ed needs to change how many transmissions are in stock at
the same time that Harold and John decide to do it, too.
TSX
is designed to make it far easier to write multithreaded code.
To prevent utter chaos, there are two routes
the programmer can take: The easiest is to lock the entire table (or using our
example, the entire spreadsheet) so that only one thread, or worker, can edit
it at a time. This is called a coarse grain lock. The problem here is that now
Harold. John, Wai, and the other four workers sit idle while waiting for Ed to
update his information in the spreadsheet. To extract more performance, a
programmer can slice and dice the entire table into smaller sections so each
can be locked when accessed. This is called a fine-grain Lock and it’s akin to
breaking the spreadsheet into a dozen pieces so more people can edit it at the
same time. But a fine grain lock entails a Lot more code for the programmer to
write and balance. What TSX does is add logic, so the processor itself can
sense when the same table is being written to by different threads. So if two
workers try to write to the same part of the spreadsheet, TSX acts as the
traffic cop and either tells one of the workers to chill for a second or sends
both to the break room. The programmer only needs to set the rules for how TSX
wilt bounce the workers.
The
programmer only needs to set the rules for how TSX wilt bounce the workers.
From an efficiency point of view, TSX promises
the performance of slicing and dicing that table into Little pieces but with
the programming simplicity of locking the entire table.
A New Socket
Every spring, Intel performs the same ritual.
It clears the cobwebs off of its test benches, donates the old, ill-fitting Lab
coats to some disadvantaged company stilt using a 32nm process, and, well,
drop-kicks the mainstream consumer motherboard socket into the dustbin. Well.
guess what? It’s that time of year again and LGA1155 is going to join the likes
of LGA1156 and LGA1 366 in a rat-infested landfill.
As usual, the change isn’t being made just to
piss you off (at Least. we think), but rather to accommodate additional
functionality being moved into the processor. LGA1155 is dead. but at least
Intel isn’t killing the cooler offsets. Like the move from LGA1156to LGA1155.
it looks Like LGA115O will be able to use the same heatsinks as its
predecessor.
Beyond core improvements. Intel is promising
huge gains in power conservation, too. How huge? About a 40 percent decrease in
power consumption while offering more performance. Intel says it will have
mobile versions of Haswell that will cut power consumption down to 10 watts
versus the 17 watts consumed by a comparable Ivy Bridge such as the 3GHz Core
i7-3517 U.
Overall, Haswell is indeed shaping up to be an
epic new processor but one thing no one knows is when it will arrive. Intel’s
only comment at this point is, sometime next year.”
