Intel Broadwell CPUs to Arrive Later This Year
It looks like we'll be seeing the smaller Broadwell CPUs from Intel before you need to put a new calendar on your wall.
Reuters reports Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich has said that the upcoming "Broadwell" CPUs would be arriving before the holiday season. This means that we'll be seeing the CPUs available before 2015 arrives.
"I can guarantee for holiday, and not at the last second of holiday," Krzanich said in an interview. "Back to school - that's a tight one. Back to school you have to really have it on-shelf in July, August. That's going to be tough."
That the CPUs won't be arriving in time for a back-to-school release is hardly surprising -- the Haswell refresh series of processors, along with the 9-series chipsets, just came out.
The Broadwell processors are expected to be built on the 14 nm lithographic process, making them smaller and thus even more efficient than the current processors that are available. The current Haswell Refresh processors are still built on the 22 nm process. Increased efficiency will help both thermals as well as battery life. The CPUs will continue to feature the same architecture as the current Haswell processors, placing a tick in Intel's tick-tock release cycle.
Same here. I picked up a 4770k for $200 from my local shop. Incredible deal. And yeah, I'm not going to be needing a whole new build for at least three or four years. Maybe an upgrade here and there, a new graphics card if I decide to go 4K. But other than that, I'm really set for a long time.
IIRC, Broadwell is supposed to bring GT3/GT3e (HD5xxx) availability across most of the lineup, which should make its IGP about twice as fast as HD4xxx parts.
For HTPC, even a 6+ years old Core2Duo can handle multiple HD/h264 streams in full-software decode so Broadwell would be a "little" overkill for that.
For a steambox or other lightweight/low-power gaming/3D applications, GT3/3e becoming the baseline IGP would help a fair bit but this won't be happening across the board until Skylake unless Intel changes their plans.
IIRC, Broadwell is supposed to bring GT3/GT3e (HD5xxx) availability across most of the lineup, which should make its IGP about twice as fast as HD4xxx parts.
For HTPC, even a 6+ years old Core2Duo can handle multiple HD/h264 streams in full-software decode so Broadwell would be a "little" overkill for that.
For a steambox or other lightweight/low-power gaming/3D applications, GT3/3e becoming the baseline IGP would help a fair bit but this won't be happening across the board until Skylake unless Intel changes their plans.
Yeah, I am looking at building mini-pc w/o a dedicated card using the Antec 110 ISK. I've been trying to decide if I should wait for the AMD a8-7600, Intel Broadwell, or a current Haswell running HD4600 if Broadwell isn't much of an improvement in power/graphics. It will be for HTPC, emulation, and some steam gaming capabilities as it will be used strictly on my TV.
The other foundries (UMC, TSMC, GF, etc.) are almost three years behind Intel process-wise and for AMD/Nvidia/etc.'s sakes, they probably cannot afford falling much further behind than that - matching Intel on performance/watt is going to become extremely difficult if foundries slip a whole two process nodes (4-5 years) behind Intel and Samsung.
Since Samsung and GF decided to start doing "copy-smart" to help ramp up 14nm last month, there is a chance GF might move up to only being a year behind Intel instead of slipping further behind.
Same here; I remember helping my dad build the 'ol Pentium II system... and then attempting to do video editing on it for school projects, which was painful. My first personal build was a Coppermine Pentium III which had the 180mm die shrink and I remember being amazed at how small it was in comparison.
I think they have another 2-3 die shrinks before they hit the wall, and then we are going to see major changes in the materials used to squeeze another 2-3 die shrinks before they are going to have to start implementing new instruction sets and architectures to get further efficiencies. It is going to be pretty cool to see, but once we start making major changes to architecture and instructions then we are going to have to say good-bye to legacy applications that have built up over the last 20 years, and that will be a little sad to see.
Intel has already tried going with a "more efficient" instruction set on Itanium with tons of branch predication and other neat stuff that was supposed to enhance performance and scalability yet that failed to scale beyond x86's performance.
ARM, Power, Sparc and other ISAs are also failing to outclass x86 on raw performance and power-efficiency in many situations. As kludgy as x86 might be, Intel has managed to bring it on par with the best of anything else available today with things like uOPS cache to almost eliminate complex instruction performance hits and complexity (who would have thought ~2GHz dual-core x86 CPUs could be squeezed into 2-3W power budgets only a few years ago?) so it seems unlikely the industry is going to give it up any time soon - too much hassle for little to no gain.
Intel's biggest challenge/shortcoming for SoCs is the IGP. Bump that up a notch or two and Intel would have serious contenders across the board.
Yeah, you're talking on the Enthusiast chips. Probably not until 2016. Some of us who haven't upgraded their mobo/CPU/RAM since 2007 can't wait that long. Going for Haswell-E, We barely need PCI-e 3.0, now anyway, and how long has it been around? Waiting another 2-3 years while software is written to demand that much GPU won't kill anyone. I don't think we've even come close to hitting a ceiling with PCI-e 3.0, have we?
The other foundries (UMC, TSMC, GF, etc.) are almost three years behind Intel process-wise and for AMD/Nvidia/etc.'s sakes, they probably cannot afford falling much further behind than that - matching Intel on performance/watt is going to become extremely difficult if foundries slip a whole two process nodes (4-5 years) behind Intel and Samsung.
Since Samsung and GF decided to start doing "copy-smart" to help ramp up 14nm last month, there is a chance GF might move up to only being a year behind Intel instead of slipping further behind.
How can you say TSMC is 3yrs behind when they will ship A8's shortly for iphone6@20nm? If my 20nm is out before your 14nm at worst I'm ~2yrs behind and they have 14nm on tap for volume Q1 2016 (though I'd say Q2). If Intel's coming this Oct/Nov with devices (they said they'd miss back to school) and TSMC is looking at somewhere in 1h2016 for 16nm again that's under 2yrs.
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1319679&page_number=8
20nm socs 3q14 for phones and tablets.
http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20140311PD203.html
Either they are completely lying or 20% of their revenue is 20nm this year in Q4. They are ramping and ahead of schedule already (fixed yields).
Samsung's A8 is coming a little later, so I'm not seeing your points. Don't get me wrong, I think samsung wins in the end if financials don't change for Intel/TSMC so they can keep up with $30B that samsung makes but TSMC appears to be in front on 20nm. You can't win as Intel or TSMC when samsung is spending 22B and Intel 11B while TSMC spent 9.7B (upping it this year to 11-12B IIRC, so tie ballgame for TSMC). Unless Intel figures out how to stop samsung from selling so many phones/tablets they are screwed most likely in 5yrs. If Samsung continues in 5yrs they will have spent $100B on fabs to Intel's 50B. Intel fabs are dead if they don't change the game here in some way that matters.
http://www.dailytech.com/TSMC+Were+Far+Superior+to+Intel+and+Samsung+as+a+Partner+Fab/article34148.htm
"TSMC is starting its first 20 nm mass production this quarter, which will put it ahead of Intel -- if only briefly."
"So arguably TSMC is about a year behind Intel in process, at present, and Samsung is a year behind TSMC. Globalfoundries, a fourth major player, is thought to be a little behind Samsung."
So you say 3yrs, Dailytech, eetimes, digitimes etc think they are NOWHERE near 3yrs behind and samsung is behind tsmc. Everybody seems to agree but you. What is it you know that they do not? Is intel selling 40mil phones? Millions of top tablets behind our backs? NO. There is no process lead here. They are equal or you'd be winning something. I hate to agree with J. Mick, but this time he's not crazy
You have too much faith in (love for?) intel. Certainly as an AMERICAN fanboy (not intel, more AMD old time fanboy here but management has been killing them for a decade) I'd rather see an american company squash samsung (and TSMC) but the spending facts don't lie so no point in ignoring the reality here for me. IBM might look like they stepped away from the gang, but the R&D that is needed for most of their part is done for 20/14nm. Also they are still collaborating on below this, though probably until IBM dumps it all. They haven't been fabbing tons anyway; IBM does R&D then passes it to the other two to let them flesh it all out (they do not fab much themselves). Of course also as an american I'd rather see samsung kick the crap out of TSMC instead of see TSMC reach the top. I don't see how TSMC wins as they totally depend on the fab, where samsung has other devices to sell (phones, tablets, glass, memory, ssd's, tvs etc etc). This will be a war like google/amazon driving down phones (or killing an OS/DirectX in google vs. MS war) because they have ways to bleed you to death on the hardware while OTHER stuff pays the bills (books, movies etc on amazon, ads etc for google).
The most important point to me about Intel? For all the love of their process stuff from people like you (and me years ago), what has it gotten them? IF they are so far ahead, why are they not getting squat in phones and tablets? They are having to PAY to get into devices. They are promising to make up the cost difference on an ARM chip vs. Baytrail etc if you go their way (funny, I thought that was anti-competitive). They are essentially making nothing to get into a device (selling at ARM pricing instead of INTEL pricing). How good is a process if you are NOT the leaders because of it? It's 28nm vs 22nm and you gained nothing even with finfet (when they get it what then? Even that little help is gone). It's going to be 20nm vs. 14nm soon and again you'll gain nothing from it. I predict we will see the same things on the new processes from both sides. Intel will again have to buy their way into stuff unless magically 20nm fails for samsung/tsmc shortly (they are ramping already at tsmc for iphione6 with far better yields now so no magic will stop this).
I'm not alone thinking the above:
http://www.eetimes.com/document.asp?doc_id=1322263
JP Morgan - QUIT MOBILE
"We continue to believe Intel will lose money and not gain material EPS from tablets or smartphones"
Proof they are right so far:
"The mobile and communications group saw a $3.1 billion operating loss in 2013, with 1Q 2014 losses hitting $929 million and revenues at $156 million."
So 3.1B last year, and based on 1Q14, looks like you're ramping to a 4B loss this year right?
Intel's dumb comments in response:
"We feel that we have a plan"
"We’re actually feeling pretty good"
ROFL. Sounds confident. I'd prefer "we will dominate because of X and this is how and why they will suck compared to us" - something like that. They are a gorilla trying to thump the chest without arms (pun intended)...LOL.
and worse:
“Keep in mind we are also manufacturing these chips now at 22 nm, and we are in the process of starting up our 14 nm process.”
Umm...OK, and everyone else is doing this (to use Intel's own words):
“Keep in mind we are also manufacturing these chips now at 28 nm, and we are in the process of starting up our 20 nm process.” and will beat Intel to our new process...
See how that works? You're getting nowhere. Time to buy NV so you can get into the ARM game for real. Producing their chips on Intel's process WILL make a difference. Better mobile design+your process=WIN The definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over and expecting different results right?
I'd say buy NV or AMD if AMD had a few socs out already but they just don't so you have to go with #1 gpu (their weak link forever) and a proven soc history with a desktop gpu in them now. Anything less than this is a failure that screws your company and shareholders out of $3-4B a year. Once 64bit models on ARM's side hit the desktops I'd bet money someone on ARM's side will decide to "vertically integrate" more and put out a DISCRETE GPU to cut out AMD/NV from being in their 500w ARM PC's. That is a no brainer. They won't want to support their mortal enemies' bottom lines with GPU sales who's profits will ultimately be used against them (AMD isn't an enemy yet, but will be the second their mobile socs hit). INTEL is NOT ahead. $1B Q1 loss purely on mobile doesn't lie.