Fourth generation Intel Core preview: all about Haswell

Haswell is a new architecture based on an existing manufacturing process. That means it will have the 22nm Tri-Gate ‘3D’ transistors introduced with Ivy Bridge. The main enhancements of the CPU architecture come in the shape of new instructions (AVX 2) and support for transactional memory. The latter should make multi-threaded software run faster. The integrated GPU in the consumer models should also be a lot faster, and it will support DirectX 11.1. Intel is taking the integration of the chipset in the processor a step further, even releasing a complete system-on-a-chip (SoC) version of the processor.