Intel has confirmed that it will be showing off its next-generation Haswell processors at Computex in Taipei, although the company has yet to state outright whether this will be a paper launch or the start of full retail availability.
Intel's fourth-generation Core architecture, Haswell introduces some significant tweaks over the current-generation Ivy Bridge, which was a mere process node shrink of Sandy Bridge with few innovations of its own. Chief among these is the introduction of
transactional memory technology, which significantly boosts the performance of multithreaded code written with the technique in mind, and the
Haswell New Instructions, which increase the existing instruction set with wider SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) support and performance-boosted floating point multiple-accumulate functionality.
Other improvements rumoured to appear in Haswell include
10-day always-connected standby runtimes for laptops and claims of
models featuring a coherent L4 cache that is shared between the central processing cores and the integrated graphics cores. Coupled with a claimed boost to the performance of the integrated graphics cores itself, Hasell has much to offer over its predecessors.
Widely rumoured to be launching at Computex, it's little surprise to find that Intel has begin a countdown to the fourth-generation Core family which puts the launch date firmly at the 3rd of June - the day before the Computex 2013 conference opens in Taipei.
While Intel isn't saying whether its 'launch' constitutes retail availability or a mere 'paper launch' - the name given to the unveiling of a product in advance of actual mass production and mainstream availability - it certainly suggests that Haswell parts will be readily available by the second half of the year.
Thus far, the company hasn't confirmed the specifications or prices of the products it intends to unveil, but Chinese-language tech site
VR-Zone (translated) claims to have sight of a spec sheet for the full family of fourth-generation desktop Core chips - including details of the low-power variants, which dip as low as 35W for a quad-core 2GHz model with HyperThreading support and 8MB cache.
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