Print   Email a friend

Energy Efficient Performance

Energy Efficient Performance

While the world has less energy to spare, the need for greater energy-efficient performance becomes increasingly important. But this does not decrease the demand for more powerful compute capabilities. To address this, Intel is delivering new hardware and software innovations that translate into extraordinary computer experiences.

Architecture innovation

Intel weighs every feature added to our next-generation microarchitecture against a strict power/performance ratio-a feature being added must not add more than a one percent power gain for a less than three percent power cost.¹

By measuring the benefit of the performance gain against the cost of power use, Intel is able to design new microarchitecture to deliver greater power efficiency at any power envelope.¹

Building computing headroom and performance that enables a smaller footprint and decreased power demands, Intel® microarchitecture enables new power-conscious design features, including:

  • Intel® QuickPath Technology, connecting processors and other components to deliver best-in-class performance, bandwidth, and reliability
  • Dynamic resource scaling, powering up only those components needed
  • An integrated memory controller (IMC), improving performance and efficiency by increasing each execution core's ability to access data from the cache
  • Intel® Smart Cache, increasing performance by optimizing memory bandwidth

Data center efficiency

Silicon innovation

Supporting new levels of energy-efficient performance, the first 45nm Intel® Core™ microarchitecture is based on dramatically different transistor materials. Designed using hafnium circuitry, Intel Core microarchitecture reduces electrical leakage that can hamper chip and PC design, size, power consumption, noise, and costs. This truly dynamic and design-scalable microarchitecture delivers the compute power you need for notebook and desktop PCs, workstations and servers. 45nm Intel Core microarchitecture provides the following benefits:

  • Dynamically managed cores, threads, cache, interfaces, and power
  • Simultaneous multi-threading, enabling a more energy efficient means of increasing performance for multi-threaded workloads
  • Capability to run two simultaneous threads per core-an amazing eight simultaneous threads per quad-core processor and 16 simultaneous threads for dual-processor quad-core designs
  • Innovative extensions to the Intel® Streaming SIMD Extensions 4 (SSE4) that center on enhancing XML, string, and text processing performance
  • Superior multi-level cache, including an inclusive shared L3 cache