Intel are set to release a slew of new processors in the second half of this year, culminating in the release of the next-generation 14nm Broadwell chips. Intel CEO, Brian Krzanich, spoke at the Maker Faire in California to guarantee that after last year's delay (due to a "defect density issue"), Broadwell CPUs would be released in time for the holidays, “and not the last second of holiday” either.
It's going to be a cramped second half of the year in terms of Intel CPUs. We've got the Devil's Canyon Haswell refresh (opens in new tab) arriving for the start of Computex next month. They're the CPUs designed to offset the disappointment of Broadwell's production slip and could genuinely be interesting processors.
The top i7 is rumoured to be the first off-the-shelf 4GHz Core architecture processor and the hopes are that with the improved thermal interface material we might see north of 5GHz on air cooling alone.
Allied with that will be a Pentium anniversary edition processor. That's going to be a budget-oriented K-series CPU, with a nominal 3.2GHz clockspeed, two Haswell cores, but sadly no HyperThreading. Still, if we can push that well above 4GHz, that should be a very interesting gaming chip.
Then there are the ultra high-end Haswell-E processors, likely arriving just before the Intel Developer Forum in September. Those will be the Haswell Xeon-based chips set for the X99 platform offering the first taste of consumer DDR4 memory to boot. That's a lot of competing CPU silicon. I look forward to seeing what they can do.
