Intel Haswell Mobile Chipsets Revealed

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Intel's third-generation of central processing units hasn't even been fully launched yet, but already there is information on the next generation of processors and accompanying chipsets.

For those who haven't guessed it yet, by “next-generation” CPUs we mean the Haswell series, the ones that will even introduce DDR4 support eventually.

Sure, the first Haswell, bound for 2013 release, won't have that asset, but the Haswell-EX series will, starting in 2014.

We've seen the web uncover quite a few other bits and pieces of information about Haswell, down to DirectX 1.1 support and 4th-Level On-Package cache for the GPU.

Most recently though, VR-Zone claims to have learned the names of the chipsets that will support the mobile range of processors.

There will be five in total, instead of the seven that Ivy Bridge notebook chips can land on.

General consumer notebooks will use the HM87, HM85 or HM80 platform, while business laptops will receive the QM87. Ultrabooks will boast a special chipset called UM83.

Indeed, Ultrabooks will have a unique hardware layout among notebooks, although the underlining platform concept is the same.

HM87 and QM87 will support both Intel Smart Response technology (SSD caching) and RAID storage configurations. No explanation exists for why the former won't be included in all five, despite its usefulness.

For those who've yet to get up to speed on the technology, SSD caching works by “merging” an HDD and an SSD together. As in the BIOS can make the OS think they are a single storage entity, thus combining the data capacity of the former with the speed of the latter.

The report mentions that, in addition to the above, there will be a single-chip part in the series, an SoC of sorts (system-on-chip), with the CPU, GPU and the Lynx Point LP (Low Power probably) on the same package. We'll keep an eye out for further details.

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Intel Haswell Graphics Better Due to 4th-Level On-Package Cache

Even though most people are looking forward to the Intel Ivy Bridge CPUs, enough attention if being spared for the architecture that will come afterwards.

Haswell is supposed to be released in the first half of next year, 2013, according to recent leaks, but that isn't all that reports have been saying about it.

There also seem to be some words about the graphics component of the chips and what Intel is trying to do in its quest for higher performance.

It is no secret that NVIDIA and Advanced Micro Devices still have the advantage in this area, even though Intel's graphics market share is the largest (because of the sales of CPUs with integrated GPUs).

To eliminate the gap in performance, or at least reduce it, Haswell will boast something called 4th-level cache.

This cache memory will play the part of video memory and won't actually be included in the Haswell silicon die.

Instead, it will sit on top of the package, which means that the next-generation Intel CPUs will be multi-chip modules (MCM) rather than single-piece chips.

The L4 cache should be capable of reducing or completely offloading the integrated GPU's dependency on the system memory.

We aren't sure how the communication between the iGPU and the 4th level cache will be made. We also can't be certain just how great a performance boost the new architecture will bring about.

We guess Intel would love to make discrete or add-in graphics completely unnecessary, but we doubt that will happen.

Still, if there was any doubt as to whether or not entry-level graphics cards were doomed, there definitely isn't going to be next year.

It should be noted that Intel's plan isn't exactly a new idea, since IBM used to offer eDRAM (embedded-DRAM) when selling some console processor ASICs. AMD did something similar with the DDR3-Sideport memory, which gave Radeon IGP about 128 MB of fast DDR3 memory.

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