Haswell therefore arrives substantially later than originally anticipated and it appears that Intel's product cadence has become much more elastic recently.
I'm not sure what you were anticipating, but since Sandy launched in Jan and ivy launched in April, i was expecting a July launch. Otellini's surprise announcement then led me to speculate a May-June launch.
[citation][nom]azxcvbnm321[/nom]I think the slowdown is deliberate because they're really only competing against themselves now and releasing an even faster CPU won't drive sales any further. It's pointless for Intel to keep on releasing better CPUs as the top CPUs are already good enough for 95% of the people out there, only in special circumstances do some people require faster CPUs. Not since the early-mid 1990's has Intel enjoyed this type of dominance. Back then, they deliberately did not release their fastest architecture, the 486 was released years after it was ready, same with Pentium (x586). We might see a repeat of those days now that AMD is not competitive and has no chance of catching up within the next 4 years or so. It could take that long for AMD just to catch up with Ivy Bridge, and I'm talking about matching performance on all levels, not on just select heavily threaded applications.[/citation]
Ahaha. No, they're not competing with themselves, their competing with ARM. ARM's behind them on performance, but they're already rivaling ARM in efficiency, and till they dominate ARM here, they're not going to look at raw performance. More evidence for that lies here:
[citation][nom]icemunk[/nom]You're right. I spoke with a Intel engineer and they said they were no longer focusing on speed, and more focused on energy efficiency/reduction. They are only growing CPU speeds at 10% per year right now.[/citation]
and
http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/atom-z2760-power-consumption-arm,3387.html
http://www.anandtech.com/show/6529/busting-the-x86-power-myth-indepth-clover-trail-power-analysis
Then i think they're going to look more into graphics, where i suppose they'd compete with AMD in the low-end PC space and Nvidia/PowerVR in the ultra-mobile space.
Who knows, if Steamroller impresses, maybe then they'll switch back to performance.