David Kanter dissects Haswell

Intel's upcoming Haswell processor is likely to be as big an advance over today's Sandy and Ivy Bridge CPUs as the "Bridge sisters" were over the prior-gen Nehalem chips. That's huge progress, but how could Intel achieve such gains once again?

The answer comes down to three broad areas of change: a nicely improved CPU microarchitecture, design work more carefully tailored to 22-nm fabrication process, and quite likely an improved system architecture. We don't yet have details on the Haswell system architecture, but Intel has disclosed quite a bit about Haswell otherwise.