14 DAY TRIAL // At some point in the third quarter of next year, 2014, Intel will launch a new line of high-end server central processing units, called Haswell-E. For the first time, a picture of a chip from that series has made its way to the net.
It almost looks coreographed, how this picture shows up at the same time as the information about those 64-Bit ARM Opteron CPUs that AMD will release next year.
Clearly, even though AMD is likely to throw the entire server and data center industry for a loop, Intel is going to do its best to maintain its current hold on those segments.
The company is preparing Haswell-E high-end processors with up to 8 cores. In fact, the chip in the picture up on the left is such a processor.
Its exact name hasn't been given, or even an individual codename. We only know that it is part of the Haswell-E line and that it runs all those 8 cores at 3 GHz.
Intel is using the 22nm manufacturing technology here, the same one used for Ivy Bridge-E, and will ship two versions at launch: an “X” line and a “K” Edition.
The “K” chips will be the “normal” ones, so to speak, while the “X” series will include the high-end models, made for mighty workstations.
On that note, it's unclear whether the engineering sample pictured here is a K or X unit. Possibly one of the former, since 3 GHz doesn't sound like much when consumer Core i7 units operate in the 4 GHz+ range.
Then again, this is an 8-core unit, not a quad-core or six-core, where the TDP is manageable at those speeds, so it can be either line.
We probably won't know for sure until the third quarter of next year, when the lineup will debut. Then again, with market watchers being who they are, info is bound to leak sooner.
All Haswell-E CPUs will work with DDR4 and X99-based motherboards, but not X79 or earlier. There will be USB 3.0 and 10-port SATA 6 Gbps support in the chipset.