The replacement for the Ivy Bridge-E series of CPU’s is set for the third quarter of 2014, and will cost a cool $1000 per CPU. The CPU’s will be pretty much what you’d expect, a 22nm die, with 8 cores (each with Intel’s Hyper-Threading technology). We’ll also be seeing these as two CPU’s lines, the x series and the k series of processors.
So aside from Hyper-Threading, what other technology will the Haswell-E support? Turbo Boost 2.0 for one, the third generation PCI-Express and finally – DDR4 memory. DDR4 will be a substantial bandwidth upgrade for the PC’s. Right now, DDR3 memory is being pushed to about its limits for the higher end processors, and the Haswell-E (with 16 threads) would likely end up being bandwidth starved in certain scenarios. There was news recently that DDR3 performance had been improved by Micron by 18 percent, by solving issues with tFAW, but it’s not really going to be enough long term. DDR4 at the start will provide an increase of about 50 percent extra memory bandwidth than DDR3, and a power saving of 35 percent.
Meanwhile, Intel will be releasing the X99 chipset to coincide with the launch of the new Haswell-E CPU’s. Details are fairly thin on the ground, but we’re expecting 10 SATA 3 (GB/s) connections on the motherboard and native USB 3.0. It goes without saying that the boards will also support the DDR4 memory type, reported to be up to 2133MHZ.
There’ll also be the Haswell refresh in the second quarter of 2014 too. Intel are reported to be wanting to start shipping the CPU’s in May, and the platform will be revealed in June during the Computex event.
In March and April the Z97 and the H97 chipsets will make an appearance. The plan is that motherboard vendors can then have the 9 series parts out by April / May time.
All of this information comes from Digitimes, who have an unnamed source from somewhere in the supply chain. Whether or not this turns out to be true is of course unknown, but it would certainly seem to fit into Intel’s usual schedule.
