Introduction
Contents
The Haswell microarchitecture expands the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture by adding a few new features, such as a new graphics engine, the new AVX2 instruction set, new dispatch ports, and more. Let’s see what is new.
For a better understanding of this tutorial, we recommend you read our “Inside the Intel Ivy Bridge Microarchitecture” tutorial before continuing.
The bad news for users who like to upgrade their computers by simply replacing the CPU is that CPUs based on the new Haswell microarchitecture will use a different socket type (LGA1150 on desktop models), making it impossible for you to replace your current CPU with a Haswell-based model.
The Haswell microarchitecture expands the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture by adding the following new features:
- New socket LGA1150 on desktop processors
- Support for the new AVX2 instruction set
- Support for the new TSX instruction set
- Support for the new bit manipulation instructions
- Two additional dispatch ports connecting the Reservation Station to execution units
- New 2D video engine
- New DirectX 11.1 graphics engine
- New S0ix power states, which allows power savings similar to those available with current “sleep” states, but making the CPU to “awake” 20x faster than traditional “sleep” states. These new states are used when the computer is on but the CPU is idle.
Other features remain the same as the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture.
Let’s now talk a little more about these new features.
