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The tray version of highly anticipated flagship of Intel's next generation Haswell processors, the i7-4770k has surfaced on the webstore of two Dutch stores, MaxICT and TakeItNow. The Core i7-4770K is unsurprisingly currently out of stock and is priced at €330 ($424.88) on MaxICT and €350 ($450.63) on TakeItNow which is of course higher than its predecessor, i7-3770K that currently retails for €316 ($406.85) in the Netherlands.
It is anyone's guess as to whether this price represents confirmation that Haswell will retail with a higher retail cost or if the two stores have simply inflated the price due to the early release date.
The product pages further indicate that the Core i7-4770K is a socket 1150 processor and will have a standard clock of 3.5 GHz. Screengrabs from Hardware.Info.
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Even though I stated the reasons not to find this interesting above, I suppose it is just one further sign that Haswell actually exists and will actually be sold. Maybe that excites some people, but Intel is pretty reliable about releasing the products they have developed, especially in this market segment.
...but they change it the platform!! from socket 1155 to socket 1150!!
Intel isn't trying to sell Haswell to someone who already owns Ivy. Think of it like the auto-industry: each generation of Ford needs to be competitive to Toyota and Chevrolet in order to sell, but in no way can you perceive it a failure if Ford doesn't sell 2013 vehicles to everyone who bought a 2012 vehicle.
Enthusiasts and gamers aside, most people would still be perfectly fine with a Core2Duo. While my i5-3470 is ~2.5X as fast as my C2D-E8400 in theory, it only feels ~30% faster for most everyday use. The main reason I upgraded was that I really needed more than 8GB RAM but 16GB DDR2 cost nearly as much as i5+16GB DDR3+h77 and opens up the option of going for 32GB RAM later so sticking to my C2D made no sense.
So there are at least three factors contributing to drops in conventional PC sales:
- people do not need any more desktop processing power than they already have so they replace PCs less often
- people replacing their aging desktops with better laptops
- PCs getting knocked down people's priority list by smartphones, tablets, consoles, embedded platforms, etc. that can fulfill many of PCs' and laptops' traditional roles either by themselves or when combined with adequate accessories such as bluetooth keyboard/mouse.
- support for recently added hardware instructions (can make a huge speedup in some situations)
- power savings for same or better computational power
For me the power savings look interesting (quad core with base clock of 3.5GHz with 65W DTP)
Well, you are right! That got past me in my post-lunch slumber =)
Just can't trust Intel to keep a platform long enough for us to consider a CPU-only upgrade.
Intel is changing the socket.
10% increase was bigger than I was expecting. IB was only a 7% increase over SB, so a 10% boost is at least noteable.
But then again, I am with you. I will be rocking my 2600 for a good long while yet. The issue is not one of if Intel could push more performance out of their newer chips... there is just very little that I do that sustains an appreciable load on my current processor. When I can play games at well under 50% load, why would I even think about upgrading? In a few years when next gen games start pushing hardware again then I will consider upgrading, but for now the only think I am hoping to upgrade in my system is a GPU with more onboard ram (but even my GPU performance is adequate, it is just some games like Skyrim that just eat all of the GDDR which then causes issues).
Intel can call me back when they have true 8 core CPUs for under $350, and things like DDR4 and SATA4 are available.