If you’ve been hanging on for news on the release date of Intel’s Broadwell CPU there’s some light at the end of the tunnel, it should arrive during 2014. Reuters are reporting that Brian Krzaninch from Intel has confirmed Broadwell will be arriving before this holiday season.
“I can guarantee for holiday, and not at the last second of holiday,” Krzanich explaining during an interview. “Back to school – that’s a tight one. Back to school you have to really have it on-shelf in July, August. That’s going to be tough.”
With the recent refresh of Haswell alongside the 9-series chipsets Intel seem to be on a bit of a roll. Broadwell will shrink things down even further than Haswell (which is using 22 nm), all the way to a 14 nm lithographic process. The Broadwell CPU will be a tick rather than a tock for Intel, in other words an evolution of the Haswell architecture and not an entirely new beast.
The die shrink will of course reduce their power requirements and heat output, which will be great for lightweight devices. Despite Haswell being a relative success it did have one major weak point, overclocking. The CPU’s became rather toasty while overclocked (particularly during the summer months) which has prompted users of either the Sandy or Ivy bridge to stay with their current rigs if they’ve gotten a decent overclock.
For example – in many tasks the jump from a Sandy Bridge I7 2600K to a Haswell I7 4770K is about 20 percent faster clock for clock (of course this is task dependent). So for users who’ve a decently overclocked 2600K it makes a good deal of sense for them to stick with their current setup. Of course there’s always the chance you won the silicone lottery with your Haswell and it doesn’t require extra volts to get a decent bump in clock speed.
For the sake of overclocker’s let’s hope Broadwell is a little easier to cool, eh?
