Bridge and Nehalem for example. The
next generation of INTEL products
will be a tick essentially bringing the
Haswell microarchitecture to 14nm.
The fifth generation of INTEL Core
products we know as Broadwell. The
next Tock, after Broadwell in 2014 is
Skylake, scheduled for 2015 release.
So what is new about Haswell?
From a practical overclocking
point of view, not much, however
from an engineering and focuson-overclocking perspective, a lot
has changed.
The most dramatic novelty in
Haswell is moving a large chunk of
the VRM from the motherboard onto
the CPU die - that is integrating it
into the CPU package. This is quite
an impressive feat from a design
perspective. Many people, enthusiasts
such as you and us, feared that INTEL’s
taking over the control of the VRM
design would limit the overclocking
capabilities in a similar fashion as
integrating the clock generator
limited overclocking on Sandy Bridge.
Fortunately, that is not the case.
Apart from the VRM implementation,
Haswell introduces a couple of new
instruction sets, an on-die eDram
and a variety of improvements for
overclocking.
HASWELL FREQUENCY CONTROL
- THE BASICS
As the main structural parts of the
Haswell micro-architecture are quite
similar to those of Ivy Bridge, we can
distinguish mostly similar sections on
the CPU die:
- Core(s)
- L1, L2 and L3 cache
- Ring bus
- System Agent
- Integrated Memory Controller
- Integrated Graphics Processor
- Edram IC
Simply stated, the Ring bus connects
the various sections of the silicon,
just like on Sandy Bridge. The L1 and
L2 cache are still exclusive to the
CPU cores, meaning each CPU core
has its own L1 and L2 cache, and the
larger L3 cache is shared with all
cores as well as the internal graphics
processor. The ring bus serves as a
data bus for transferring data around
the CPU die. New in Haswell is the
introduction of an on-die IC called
eDram, [which according to INTEL
provides significantly more bandwidth
and reduced access latency compared
to regular DDR3 and will be used
to support the integrated graphics
processor for performance purposes].
Issue 24 | 2013 The OverClocker 31