Intel Confirms Devil's Canyon, Haswell-E, Broadwell Rumors

[Crashman]

Intel announces a 2014 Haswell refresh that will usher in a plethora of new enthusiast-class CPU models to be released before 2015’s Broadwell.

Intel Confirms Devil's Canyon, Haswell-E, Broadwell Rumors : Read more

 

[monsta]

Lets hope it's not just a massive 10 percent difference in performance and Motherboard change as we have been seeing over the past couple of generations from Intel.....they really need to step it up

 

[blubbey]

If Intel can pull a Sandy Bridge with DC's OCing capabilities that'd be fantastic. An unlocked Pentium could be a solid option for budget builds too. Only thing with Iris Pro is that *if* it's for higher end CPUs, those buying them will more than likely have a beefy GPU making it pointless. However if they can provide some competition for AMD in the lower cost iGPU market that'd be great to see (although a discrete GPU + CPU combo could still be better).

 

[InvalidError]

Only thing with Iris Pro is that *if* it's for higher end CPUs, those buying them will more than likely have a beefy GPU making it pointless.

The slide does say "unlocked desktop processors" and that does usually mean the highest-end of the range.

IIRC, there was a leaked slide a few months ago that showed the eDRAM "L4 cache" being standard across the Broadwell lineup. I would not be too surprised if Intel's hyped air gestures used Iris Pro GPGPU.

 

[rohitbaran]

@monstaThey don't have to do much as long as AMD isn't matching them in single thread performance, sadly. It's AMD who need to step their game up to drive the CPU prices down a bit.

 

[southernshark]

Lets hope it's not just a massive 10 percent difference in performance and Motherboard change as we have been seeing over the past couple of generations from Intel.....they really need to step it up

It's a refresh of an architecture which is 4 years old now, so I wouldn't expect much more than a 5-12 percent increase in alleged performance. In the real world, you won't notice the difference.

 

[InvalidError]

Lets hope it's not just a massive 10 percent difference in performance and Motherboard change as we have been seeing over the past couple of generations from Intel.....they really need to step it up

It's a refresh of an architecture which is 4 years old now

Haswell is a new architecture (two extra execution ports, 24 extra re-order buffer entries, re-arranged cache, re-arranged branch prediction and a handful of other enhancements compared to SB/IB) and is not even one year old yet. Broadwell is little more than a die-shrink so there is not much reason to expect major improvements there apart from power.

Skylake is the next architecture update but considering how little of a step SB/IB to Haswell was, I would not expect Skylake to yield more than the usual ~10% that has become the norm. As I have been saying for years, most of the easy performance gains have been tapped out; there aren't any major cost-effective IPC breakthrough left so any future major desktop performance gains will have to be achieve through parallelism but such parallel CPUs are pointless until a whole lot more mainstream software becomes finely threaded, which is easier said than done.

 

[CaedenV]

Skylake is still what I am waiting for as an upgrade from Sandy Bridge... but it is not for the CPU, it will be for DDR4 and SATA Express/4 support. The thing is that software simply does not demand more performance out of the CPU for games and light content creation anymore as everything gets more and more mobile friendly. The only performance gains are in how the CPU is fed information and can spit it back out, not the raw CPU performance itself.That said... Haswell-E with 8 cores (16 threads?), DDR4, and 10 SATA ports does sound fairly exciting... a bit overkill for what I do, but still exciting.Curious that Intel would once again consider the highest end iGPUs for the i5K and i7K processors. The only people buying high-end CPUs these days are content creators and gamers... Gamers are going to have a nice fat GPU installed, and most content creators are going to have something substantial as well. But an i3 with Iris Pro on board... now that would be the king of HTPCs on the market. Or better yet a Nuk with Iris Pro would be a pretty nice option for an HTPC. But it will never happen because the bean counters would not understand it.

 

[CodeMatias]

Better TIM? Sounds like the new chips will finally be as good for overclocking as the i7 2600k/2700k were, those things hit 4GH with stock cooler no-problem. If the 4790 gets even 75% the overclocking potential it could actually give people a reason to upgrade their sandy bridge chips.

 

[tabascosauz]

WOOHOO! Get ready boys and girls for a 8-core Haswell-E CPU that will set you back a mere $1500! Oh, and the X99 motherboard you asked for will cost $400 for the basic, basic model! Oh and don't forget the DDR4! That's going to cost you $500 for a set of 2x4GB! Have fun!I mean, as nice as it all is, why don't we wait until the prices come out? I have a feeling Intel is going to slap more than just a $50 price premium on this 4790K just for -K and Broadwell compatibility. Seriously, if i7 hits $400 I might as well just bail on the whole Core boat and go with stupidly slow FX-8350 or jump on the Xeon E3 boat that offers identical performance to the Core i5s and i7s for sometimes more than $60 less. I guess I'll be waiting on the E3-1230 V3's successor, whatever it might be called.It's nice to see Intel show us LGA customers a little love with the unlocked Pentium (hooray for the Pentium 3s and 4s!) and socketed HD 5200. As long as Iris Pro LGA doesn't come with a ridiculous price tag and massive hit to L3, I'm happy.

 

[ferooxidan]

Someone whining about how we get 10% increase in performance every year or two instead double performance increase every 6-12 months in the old days. If Intel or AMD make a new very powerful processor but consumes big power, you guys will still loathe. Be realistic. There's no way to get double performance while at the same time decreasing power consumption unless u discover/invent some magical material. Otherwise u will get a processor as big as ur GPU.

 

[InvalidError]

As long as Iris Pro LGA doesn't come with a ridiculous price tag and massive hit to L3, I'm happy.

When Iris Pro got announced, at least one chip supply analyst firm estimated the cost of that 128MB chip at around $80. Since Intel has ramped the prices for a fair chunk of their CPU lines by ~$40 since Sandy Bridge, I would not be too surprised if Intel ended up absorbing half the cost in their inflated margins and tacking the other half on MSRPs... so I'm expecting Iris Pro Haswell/Broadwell desktop chips to cost ~$40 extra compared to their Haswell-v1 counterparts.

BTW, if you buy an 8-cores Haswell-E, that would be on whatever comes after LGA2011 and instead of 2x4GB, you would need 4x4GB to fill all four channels. I doubt many people going for -E chips would be comfortable with only 8GB total RAM to go with their $1000+ CPU... and with eight cores on the die, those two extra memory channels may become a fair bit more important.

@feroox: the performance doubling was more like ~18 months for CPUs. 6-12 months was for the early years of GPUs where everyone was doing radical re-designs with nearly every product generation and 2-3 concurrent design teams on staggered product cycles. Now that most efficient ways of doing stuff have been discovered and that the DX/OGL feature sets have stabilized, further performance scaling now mostly depends on process technology, TDP and surface area just like it does for CPUs and the genuinely new product cycle dropped to 18-24 months.

 

[ZeneticX]

WOOHOO! Get ready boys and girls for a 8-core Haswell-E CPU that will set you back a mere $1500! Oh, and the X99 motherboard you asked for will cost $400 for the basic, basic model! Oh and don't forget the DDR4! That's going to cost you $500 for a set of 2x4GB! Have fun!I mean, as nice as it all is, why don't we wait until the prices come out? I have a feeling Intel is going to slap more than just a $50 price premium on this 4790K just for -K and Broadwell compatibility. Seriously, if i7 hits $400 I might as well just bail on the whole Core boat and go with stupidly slow FX-8350 or jump on the Xeon E3 boat that offers identical performance to the Core i5s and i7s for sometimes more than $60 less. I guess I'll be waiting on the E3-1230 V3's successor, whatever it might be called.It's nice to see Intel show us LGA customers a little love with the unlocked Pentium (hooray for the Pentium 3s and 4s!) and socketed HD 5200. As long as Iris Pro LGA doesn't come with a ridiculous price tag and massive hit to L3, I'm happy.

intel had stated there won't be any price increase for haswell refresh. 4790k would probably replace the 4770k, and a price drop for 4770k is expected

 

[Novuake]

Oe new TIM, finally Intel is addressing that sore point.

 

[tridon]

I do wonder. When an 8-core comes out in the i7-line, will the 6-core cpu's in the i7-line be cheaper than their 3930/3960 and 4930/9460 counterparts? If the 8-core pushes down the prices of the 6-cores a little, I might be going for my very first 6-core when haswell-E comes out. At the very least it's a pleasant daydream for the time being.

 

[scythe515]

Wondering if the X99 chipset will have more bandwidth for those extra sas ports. A raid 0 array made of SSDs bottlenecked by the chipset.

 

[goodguy713]

I am hoping instead of the 6core variants that they will have the 8 core variants I personally dont want an extreme edition but i do want an 8 core version. I have been waiting for these to come out so i can upgrade from my 1090t. I wonder if they will be backward compatible with ddr3 ram.

 

[CraigN]

They are doing an 8 core, did you read the article...?They won't be backwards compatible with DDR3. Just like DDR3 isn't with 2, and DDR2 wasn't with 1. DDR4 will require new sticks.

 

[Menigmand]

Will it only be the most expensive CPUs that get the new TIM?

 

[Master467]

Someone whining about how we get 10% increase in performance every year or two instead double performance increase every 6-12 months in the old days. If Intel or AMD make a new very powerful processor but consumes big power, you guys will still loathe. Be realistic. There's no way to get double performance while at the same time decreasing power consumption unless u discover/invent some magical material. Otherwise u will get a processor as big as ur GPU.

Sockets are the size they are due to the time it takes electric to get from one side to the other, or something. I'd like to see a PCI-E CPU so we can finaly stop it with the mobo switches. Why can't the chipset be on the equivalent of a GPU's PCB, and slide the whole thing into a universal slot on the mobo?

The reason they do 10% upgrades every year is because there is no one to compete. Even when AMD tried to match Intel they were not a real threat. The GPU market is VERY competitive at the moment, look at rebranded $450 GTX 680's (770's) selling for $330. Its incredible. If we had that in the CPU market, things might actually go DOWN in price every year.

 

[burkhartmj]

Someone whining about how we get 10% increase in performance every year or two instead double performance increase every 6-12 months in the old days. If Intel or AMD make a new very powerful processor but consumes big power, you guys will still loathe. Be realistic. There's no way to get double performance while at the same time decreasing power consumption unless u discover/invent some magical material. Otherwise u will get a processor as big as ur GPU.

Sockets are the size they are due to the time it takes electric to get from one side to the other, or something. I'd like to see a PCI-E CPU so we can finaly stop it with the mobo switches. Why can't the chipset be on the equivalent of a GPU's PCB, and slide the whole thing into a universal slot on the mobo?

The reason they do 10% upgrades every year is because there is no one to compete. Even when AMD tried to match Intel they were not a real threat. The GPU market is VERY competitive at the moment, look at rebranded $450 GTX 680's (770's) selling for $330. Its incredible. If we had that in the CPU market, things might actually go DOWN in price every year.

I can't speak authoritatively on this, but wouldn't having a lot-in CPU, especially with PCIe, considerably limit its bandwidth and the number of lanes to various other devices? Having everything integrated allows much more bandwidth and specialization with how it all works together, especially when talking about communicating with memory, southbridge devices, and a GPU taking its own set of PCIe lanes.

Slot style intel CPU's used to exist in super old computers [probably 15+ years ago]. I imagine they were killed off for a reason.

 

[InvalidError]

The reason they do 10% upgrades every year is because there is no one to compete.

If improving performance was that easy, AMD would have no problem catching up with Intel. AMD having such a hard time catching up with Intel's 7-10%/year is a clear indication that pushing per-core performance beyond the current state of things is much harder than most people think it is.

The difference with GPUs is that graphics processing is intrinsically parallel so it can scale to thousands of threads easily while most user-interactive code does not scale anywhere near as well beyond one thread, which is why mainstream CPUs only have 2-4 cores and Intel's better IPC gives it a huge advantage in so many gaming benchmarks.

 

[Steveymoo]

8 core and DDR4? Nice. This sounds like the first chip worth upgrading to since OC'ing the hell out of an i5 760.

 

[XaveT]

I don't get the continual quest for lower power in a high-end CPU.In my eyes, high-end should be high power consumption, but high performance, increasing with each cycle. Mid-range (standard consumer) should be a mix of power efficiency and performance. Low-end would be all about "what can we get out of this chip that runs on a potato?". Obviously, that would require research in three directions, straight performance, mixing the two, and straight efficiency.Am I crazy for wanting to see more performance, and strictly not caring about efficiency on a gaming (toy) PC?

 

[DarkSable]

Unlocked Pentium? :OThat'll be what it takes to challenge AMD in the value range, and is going to be a very very good option for a lot of people.