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What is an Intel Crystal Well processor?

Apple updated the range of Retina Display equipped MacBook Pros yesterday with the fourth generation of Intel’s ‘Core i’ processors commonly refereed to by the codename Haswell. During the announcement Phil Schiller (Apple Senior VP of Worldwide Marketing) stated that the 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro is powered by an Intel Crystal Well processor as opposed to the 13 inch which has a Haswell chip. Considering my affinity to all things CPU related I thought I’d explain the difference between the two processors.

First a bit of background. Intel offers two major advancements with the Haswell generation of processors, the first of which anyone who has used the new MacBook Airs will tell you is all day battery life but the second is the drastically improved capabilities of the on-board graphics. Haswell processors offer two levels of integrated graphics that carry the new Iris branding, the Iris 5100 series which appears in the 13 inch Retina MacBook Pros and Iris Pro 5200 which you will find in the 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro.

Iris Pro is a 128MB chunk of eDRAM that is located on the actual processor, it’s the same kind of  on chip memory that is used in game consoles like the Xbox 360. This part of the chip was developed under the code name of Crystal Well and it’s vastly more significant than Phil Schiller could have conveyed on stage. Not only can this 128MB chunk of memory be used for graphics, but it can also be used as an ‘overflow’ cache for the CPU to put things that it’s busy working with. Bearing in mind that the processor in the 15 inch Retina MacBook Pro has a 6MB cache the extra 128MB of Iris Pro’s Crystal Well chip is a significant addition.

If you want to know more about the on-board Iris Pro graphics you can read my piece about how Iris has the potential to kill the GPU in mobile computing.

Image: Engadget

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