Broadwell Won’t be Available to Consumers Until 2H 2014
Intel's next-gen Broadwell chips won't be available until late 2014.
As an expected follow-up to a story we posted earlier this week, Intel CEO, Brian Krzanich has announced that while Broadwell chips will begin production in Q1 of 2014, they won't be available until a bit later next year. As we mentioned in our previous story, the delay has been caused by a "defect density issue," or in layman's terms, too many defective chips per circuit print.
Intel is confident that it has remedied the problem, and that its follow-ups to the Haswell line will be available in a year's time. Even so, the shift in production deadlines leaves a lot of unanswered questions, not the least of which is whether or not these CPU generations are going to start getting longer and longer.
Before too much longer, Intel and AMD and pretty much everyone else in the fab business is going to hit one barrier they can’t break – the laws of physics. As these chips get smaller and smaller, those manufacturing challenges increase, and while those chips mean tons of improvements for the consumer including lower cost, more efficiency, and better performance, after 3 nanometers quantum tunneling becomes a huge problem, and we won't be able to get any smaller.
After the 14 nm process that the current chips use, we'll have the 10 nm, the 7 nm and then finally the 5 nm.
Follow us @tomshardware, on Facebook and on Google+.

I'm sure Intel is glad to count you among its happy customers
Haswell-E would be on the same 22nm as all the Ivy Bridge and other Haswell designs so there is no reason for those to be affected by the 14nm hiccups.
I hope we all appreciate the irony of big problems working at tiny sizes
If you like huge machines working with tiny stuff, you must love the LHC!
The irony of "big.LITTLE" does not get much better than that... at least not within the scope of what science can be carried out directly on this planet.
If you like huge machines working with tiny stuff, you must love the LHC!
The irony of "big.LITTLE" does not get much better than that... at least not within the scope of what science can be carried out directly on this planet.
Sure, I got an interesting story about the use of GPU processing at the LHC from a CERN guy I met at GTC 2013.
Or right up until your Motherboard dies and you can't find a replacement which is normally the case. Right now there is a large number of Lynnfield and Core 2 CPU's gathering dust with no Motherboards to call home for example.
Haswell-E is not affected because its still 22nm. Only Broadwell and if there is a Broadwell-E will be affected.
Let's hear it.
Flying does not require pushing the fundamental laws of physics as we currently understand them to the breaking point. Chipmaking on the other hand is pushing the limits of how close to theoretical limits economically viable manufacturing can go: you cannot make traces inside chips thinner than the minimum required to ensure continuity including a margin to accommodate the manufacturing processes' variances and getting closer to that theoretical minimum requires tightening tolerances that much further across the whole process.
Smaller CMOS transistors have lower gate capacitance which allows faster switching using less power and shorter distances reduces propagation delays between gates. Both of those factors should allow faster chips.
A fair chunk of those margins is lost to reduced core voltages which reduce CMOS gate drive voltage and the associated output currents leading to smaller switching time improvements than otherwise possible and most of the rest is spent on cramming extra logic between flip-flops to improve IPC - this would be the other reason (aside from TIM under the heat-spreader) why Intel's newer CPUs have generally lower overclock margins: critical paths got longer/deeper logic-wise.