Intel IDF slides show processor roadmap to 2012's Haswell

LONDON — It appears that Intel's plans for processors to follow on from Core i7, have been revealed at a French language website called CanardPlus. The site has posted a series of slides under the title of Processors: from Nehelem to Haswell.

The slides are marked as if they are due to be show at the upcoming Intel Developer Forum and show Nehelem, which is now known as Core i7, being shrunk from 45-nm to 32-nm in 2009 under the codename Westmere. On the same process in 2010 Intel is due to introduce a redesigned processor codenamed Sandy Bridge, which will shrink to 22-nm in 2011 with a codename change of Ivy Bridge. One year later again on 22-nm process Intel is expected to introduce Haswell, according to the slides.

One characteristic of Sandy Bridge and Haswell is that they will both have up to eight processor cores on a single die. For Sandy Bridge a key architectural development is to be the adoption of something called Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX). This includes new primitives that support floating point vectorization and three- and four-operand instruction format, the slides show.

In 2012 Haswell will still be targeting eight cores per die, but with a novel cache architecture and the introduction of something called the fused multiply-add instruction.

The Intel slides could be found here when this story was first posted.

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