Intel’s (News - Alert) new Haswell microarchitecture is just the latest example of how the company and its OEM partners continue to advance performance in an affordable and predictable way.
That’s good news for Intel OEM partners, as it allows them to create and follow product roadmaps based on what Intel has in the pipeline, writes Unicom Engineering’s Austin Hipes in a recent blog. And it’s beneficial to end users, which as a result can work with OEMs to most effectively plan for the future, and continue to enjoy performance improvements that enable them to support what are typically growing processing and storage requirements – yet at about the same price, power, and physical footprint as previous iterations, he says.
A key ingredient in Intel’s winning formula on this front, Hipes explains, is the company’s Tick-Tock model, which alternates between improvements to manufacturing/process technology (the tick) and enhancements in processor microarchitecture (the tock).
The new Intel microarchitecture release, codenamed Haswell, features E5 2600 V3 processors that offer up to 18 physical cores per CPU, which mean faster memory and faster CPU interconnects. That means more compute power, enabling 40GbE, to support the growing Internet of Things. The servers powered by these processors also allow for the reliable storage of data in high-speed RAM (News - Alert) – a performance increase related to non-volatile storage that results in lower latency and delivers more bandwidth to a solid state drive than alternative technologies like SATA or SAS (News - Alert).
“While the value component improves with each subsequent release, so does the process behind which those upgrades are delivered,” writes Hipes. “By providing customers with the next generation of Intel processors and ensuring the corresponding system upgrades incorporate the latest microarchitecture, Intel delivers a balanced platform that prevents choke points from developing.”
Edited by Rory J. Thompson