Intel has shed a bit more light on its upcoming Haswell system-on-a-chip, scheduled for launch in 2013.

Haswell is supposed to integrate as much as possible on a tiny bit of silicon and it is aimed at ultra-slim notebooks, perhaps even some other form factors such as tablets. One of the main issues with low voltage parts used in thin notebooks today is the prohibitive cost, but Intel hopes to change all that with the new SoC.

Haswell-based notebooks could cost as little as $599, quite a bit less than the latest models based on Sandy Bridge ULV chips. It is still too early to talk about performance, but Intel is apparently planning to place more emphasis on graphics, to better deal with AMD and Nvidia solutions.

Intel is also talking up Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) as the next big thing. Intel claims the new extensions will help boost floating point performance in visual processing, engineering and scientific applications, gaming, physics and other number crunching applications. AVX is said to improve performance in a “wide spectrum of software architectures with varying degrees of threat parallelism”, something that parallel oriented GPUs are good at.

More here.