Intel Haswell Processors Will Have a TDP of As Low As 10 Watts

In order for the Haswell central processors to start off on the right foot, in 2013, Intel has to make as many people aware of them, which is why it will speak of the units at its upcoming IDF (Intel Developer Forum), in San Francisco.

Haswell will succeed the Ivy Bridge micro-architecture and, though it will retain the 22nm manufacturing process and 3D tri-gate transistors, it will bring quite a few new improvements, such as AVX2, Direct3D 11.1 and OpenGL 3.2 graphics and DDR4 memory support.

What we haven't been able to get a good read on was the energy use, but our curiosity has finally been sated, in a sense.

Though we still don't know the full range of chips, their specs and power draw, we do know that at least one Haswell will make do with 10W.

"It's really the first product we're building from the ground up for ultrabook," an Intel representative said, according to The Verge.

The implication is that a 10W chip will provide all the abilities of the 17W Ivy Bridge processor of today.

For those unfamiliar with the term TDP, it is an abbreviation for thermal design power (or thermal design point), a term describing how much cooling power a system needs to dissipate the heat generated by a chip.

Since 10W is still more than what ARM chips can boast about, this doesn't mean that Wintel tablets can finally match Android on ARM models in thinness. Nevertheless, 10W is still better than the 15W we had come to expect.

That said, Intel may not have ARM as primary foil when it finally releases the Haswell. If rumors pan out, AMD will have launched a platform even before then, based on its Trinity APU technology and likely less heavy on the heat generation. And since it will aim for the same market (though without a counter-brand to ultrabooks), that chip could become a more immediate threat.