Intel doubles GPU performance with Haswell – halves TDP

During the opening keynote of the Intel Developers Forum (IDF) currently held in San Francisco, Intel’s executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, David Perlmutter, has demonstrated its new Haswell CPU architecture.

During the IDF last year, Intel already gave a sneak preview of the Haswell chips, but as its market introduction is near, Intel now decided it was time to reveal more details on the Haswell CPUs.

The technology giant showed a test computer with a mobile Haswell CPU and benchmarked it against an Ultrabook with an Ivy Bridge CPU. To demonstrate that Intel is more on par with its graphic processing, they decided to use the graphical Unigine benchmark.

The DirectX 11 benchmark was demonstrated using two different setups.  During the first  both the Ivy Bridge and the Haswell chips were fully utilized with impressive results. The Haswell GPU performed two times better than the Ivy Bridge GPU, the latter wasn’t even able to decently run the benchmark, while the Haswell had no problem whatsoever.

In the second setup both chips had similar performance, but the Haswell chip used half of the watts of the Ivy Bridge chip. The TDP of the Haswell chip was around 8 watts against 17 watts for the Ivy Bridge chip. Haswell chips will become available in 2013 and like the Ivy Bridge chips will be manufactured at 22nm.

Intel doesn’t want to use the name Haswell anymore, but instead refers to ‘4th generation Intel Core’ CPUs.