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| Intel Announces Updated Haswell, Eight-Core Enthusiast Chips, And Desktop Broadwell Details |
Intel made a number of announcements at GDC this week, many of them aimed at a market that felt a bit neglected in 2013 — hardcore PC enthusiasts. Haswell and Ivy Bridge-E both arrived last year but largely failed to move the needle on CPU performance — both chips offered incremental gains at most over Ivy Bridge or Sandy Bridge-E hardware. This year Intel is launching several products that could give enthusiasts a reason to upgrade.
First, there’s Haswell-E, the upcoming enthusiast platform. The CPU is stepping up to eight cores and 16 threads (up from the current six-core, twelve-thread IVB-E chips) adding DDR4 memory, and will deploy on a new X99 chipset. The X79 chipset has gotten a bit long in the tooth compared to newer offerings like Intel’s Z87, so this shift should put the new platform back on the cutting edge of technology. No word yet on which DDR4 clock speeds will be supported.
Last year, the apparent plan was for Intel to shift from releasing a socketed desktop upgrade every year to an every-other-year cycle. Broadwell, in other words, was going to be a mobile-only part. The next desktop chip would then be Skylake, the 14nm update with a new core architecture. It wasn’t a bad idea for preserving greater gains between various processors, and Intel was apparently set to push ahead with it — but has changed its mind in the interim.
We now know Broadwell will come to desktops — and when it does, it’ll have Iris Pro graphics attached. Keep in mind that “Iris Pro” is a brand, not a formal architecture — Intel has previously claimed that Broadwell would be a major overhaul of the graphics stack. Since Iris Pro also includes a 128MB L4 cache, that means Intel is bringing a significant GPU engine over to the desktop.
If I had to guess, I’d guess that this is actually more about the 128MB L4 cache than the GPU engine. Even if Broadwell is 20-30% faster than Haswell’s GPU, that’s not going to be fast enough to answer the gaming needs of an enthusiast. But since Intel has turned the giant EDRAM pool into a last level cache (LLC), it can lean on that capability to boost CPU performance. The gains should be nice, though this chip isn’t expected before 2015.
In the meantime, in 2014, we’re getting Devil’s Canyon by mid-year, with a new and improved thermal interface material!
Note the implications of both this chip and the upcoming Broadwell supporting Intel Series 9 chipsets; it’s not clear if these “new” Haswells will drop into Z87 or if they’ll only use the newer boards (which will then be capable of using Broadwell upgrades). From what we’ve heard, the new desktop Haswells are a minor change, possibly with 100-200MHz speed bumps. The new TIM (thermal interface material) is likely solder — meaning Intel is finally moving away from the thermal paste it used last generation that caused heat dissipation problems for overclockers.
Last but not least, there’s a new “Anniversary” Pentium on tap.
Intel is adding QuickSync and unlocked multipliers to these cores, possibly in a bid to recapture a bit of enthusiast market share at the lower end. Low-end chips could be great overclockers — they were in the old days — and opening the field back up could make sub-$100 Pentiums attractive to a certain type of buyer.
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