The company will even integrate the SouthBridge in the CPU package to save power

Jul 12, 2012 23:31 GMT  ·  By

World’s biggest semiconductor and CPU manufacturer, American-Israeli company Intel, is currently hard at work on their future generation of x86 processors codenamed Haswell. The company has made no secret that Haswell would have a huge iGPU and offer the according performance, but they seem to be much more careful about what happens in the mobile space.

During this year’s Computex, AMD managed to spoil Intel’s UltraBook/Ivy Bridge party as the smaller, fabless CPU maker was able to offer much more capable Trinity CPUs with better power consumption than Intel Ivy Bridge was able to offer at the time.

To have an APU that capable of delivering twice the 3D graphics performance and consume about 25% less than Intel’s competing Ivy Bridge processor was quite an achievement for AMD.

They even have a 17-watt Trinity, while Intel had no “under 20W” Ivy Bridge.

Intel quickly rectified the situation and now also offers 17W and 35W Ivy Bridge processors.

The only problem is that these CPUs are considerably less capable then their 45W brothers.

The CPU giant doesn’t want to repeat this and it is preparing a special flavor of Haswell that will only come in dual-core configurations.

This version is reportedly called Lynx Point LP and it is practically a SoC (system on chip), as it integrates the SouthBridge of the platform next to the NorthBridge that’s already in the same die as the CPU.

Intel’s PCH (Platform Controller Hub / SouthBridge) is apparently not on-die like the Northbridge and the IMC (integrated memory controiller), and this level of integration will likely increase the price of the platform instead of making it more affordable.

Therefore, we can’t call Lynx Point LP generation a true SoC, as that’s more like a single package, but not a single chip.

This is a very power-efficient solution that will be part of Intel’s Haswell Ultrabook ULV line, but much more capable and, surprisingly, power-hungry versions are also coming.

Read about the most powerful Haswell mobile processors in the second part of our Haswell mobile lineup presentation.

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