14 DAY TRIAL // We've already seen Intel's Haswell central processing units start shipping in China, even though Intel won't officially introduce them until Computex 2013, in June.
One thing led to another and now we have an actual review of the flagship central processing unit up for perusal in China, on Chinadiy to be precise.
The Chinese seem less troubled by Intel's presumed NDAs than the rest of the world.
The Core i7-4770K will be formally introduced on June 2, according to Chinadiy, which is two days earlier than the June announcement we have mentioned before.
It is a 22nm Haswell desktop processor, belonging to the fourth generation of Core-series chips.
A quad-core with 8 threads, it runs at 3.5 GHz clock speed, although the Turbo Boost technology can drive it to 3.9 GHz if needed, on all cores.
8 MB of L3 cache memory are available, along with a very good memory controller. Everything works on 84W of power.
Meanwhile, the IGP is the HD 4600 (full codename GT2 HD 4600) and runs at 1,250 MHz.
The information is consistent with the other day's report about the specifications of the entire chip line.
Sadly, that also means that Haswell Core i7-4770K won't bring any major performance improvement over Core i7-3770 Ivy Bridge.
The average improvement is of under 5% actually, if we're reading the slides right, smaller at 4 GHz clock-to-clock comparison.
On the flip side, overclocking is easier on Haswell, thanks to the BCLK/FSB options similar to the Sandy Bridge-E processors.
Nevertheless, upgrading to Haswell won't make sense if you have an Ivy Bridge. Not even Sandy Bridge owners will have a real reason to switch actually. The only incentive is the better GPU, and that doesn't matter when high-end PCs have add-in NVIDIA or AMD video boards anyway.
