Intel Broadwell CPUs to Arrive Later This Year

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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.

Niels Broekhuijsen
Niels Broekhuijsen

Niels Broekhuijsen is a Contributing Writer for Tom's Hardware US. He reviews cases, water cooling and pc builds.

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41 Comments Comment from the forums
  • TheAshigaru
    Hopefully the performance gains will be better than the IB to Haswell jump. Not holding my breath though.
    Reply
  • dextermat
    Wait for second generation at least
    Reply
  • dstarr3
    Ahhh, 14nm. I know it's just Moore's Law and all that. But, having been building computers for fifteen or so years by now, the shrink still blows my mind a bit. Earliest I remember is working with a 350nm Pentium II. I'll be excited to see what the next 15 years has to offer once we've shrunk beyond the limits of usability.
    Reply
  • MANOFKRYPTONAK
    I'm still rocking a Sandy Bridge i7, I haven't seen any reason to upgrade yet. I'm hoping this will be enough of a reason too. But with PCI-E 3.0 and DDR4 coming maybe... :)
    Reply
  • Osmin
    If you can wait, wait for Skylake (Successor to Broadwell) which will include DDR4, PCI Express 4, Thunderbolt 3, and Octacore processors.
    Reply
  • Vlad Rose
    Has there been much stated about how much an improvement there is with the IGP on the chip over HD4600? If it's significant, it could be very nice for HTPC/Steam boxes.
    Reply
  • dstarr3
    I think Z87 was the last good platform for a little while now. Z97 is a very marginal update; the new DDR4 memory interface isn't fully matured yet, and we really need to find a solution to the storage revolution that's occurring. Storage options are very cumbersome with Z97 and SSDs are going to oversaturate what the interfaces are capable of rather quickly. There's just too many devices requiring too much bandwidth all of a sudden. Z97 is a platform featuring many new technologies in their infancy, whereas Z87 was a fully matured platform. So I think if one is looking to build a new mid-range or high-end computer, you may want to hold off another year or two.
    Reply
  • pills161
    I think Z87 was the last good platform for a little while now. Z97 is a very marginal update; the new DDR4 memory interface isn't fully matured yet, and we really need to find a solution to the storage revolution that's occurring. Storage options are very cumbersome with Z97 and SSDs are going to oversaturate what the interfaces are capable of rather quickly. There's just too many devices requiring too much bandwidth all of a sudden. Z97 is a platform featuring many new technologies in their infancy, whereas Z87 was a fully matured platform. So I think if one is looking to build a new mid-range or high-end computer, you may want to hold off another year or two.
    Yes agreed, I upgraded to Z87/Haswell around last black friday, not going to need to upgrade for a while.
    Reply
  • dstarr3
    Yes agreed, I upgraded to Z87/Haswell around last black friday, not going to need to upgrade for a while.

    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.
    Reply
  • InvalidError
    13342128 said:
    Has there been much stated about how much an improvement there is with the IGP on the chip over HD4600?
    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.
    Reply