Intel's Haswell: Optimized For Mobility

by Marco Chiappetta — Tuesday, June 04, 2013, 08:54 AM EDT

If Haswell's debut on the desktop has left you feeling a bit flat, the company's mobile efforts may be the pick-me-up you've been hoping for. If you step back and think about the entire CPU market, the last two years have been marked by tremendous shifts in consumer buying habits, as tablet sales skyrocketed and desktop/laptop sales have slumped. Intel recognized years ago that Atom, no matter how polished, would never be able to address the entire portable market -- the usage scenarios between a laptop and a smartphone are just too wide. The company therefore decided to take a two-pronged approach to this brave new frontier of computing, with a new Atom architecture anchoring the ultra-low power segments while more traditional x86 cores were prepped for form factors no one at Intel dreamed of ten years ago.

Some of the reasons Haswell is less exciting on the desktop, in other words, is because Intel prioritized a mobile architecture that would draw as little power as possible, while still offering excellent performance...

Intel's Haswell: Optimized For Mobility

Tags: Intel, core i7, Mobile, CPU, Core i5, Haswell, Ultrabook

Marco Chiappetta

Marco's interest in computing and technology dates all the way back to his early childhood. Even before being exposed to the Commodore P.E.T. and later the Commodore 64 in the early ‘80s, he was interested in electricity and electronics, and he still has the modded AFX cars and shop-worn soldering irons to prove it. Once he got his hands on his own Commodore 64, however, computing became Marco's passion. Throughout his academic and professional lives, Marco has worked with virtually every major platform from the TRS-80 and Amiga, to today's high end, multi-core servers. Over the years, he has worked in many fields related to technology and computing, including system design, assembly and sales, professional quality assurance testing, and technical writing. In addition to being the Managing Editor here at HotHardware for close to 15 years, Marco is also a freelance writer whose work has been published in a number of PC and technology related print publications and he is a regular fixture on HotHardware’s own Two and a Half Geeks webcast. - Contact: marco(at)hothardware(dot)com