14 DAY TRIAL // Being the top CPU maker and also involved in SSDs, among other things, Intel was not about to miss the game Developers Conference, which is taking place in San Francisco, California. In fact, it used the event as a staging ground for the latest information on its future processor lineup.
If you were worried that the Broadwell line of central processing units would only arrive in 2015, never fear for Intel has confirmed that they are coming this year.
In fact, at the GDC 2014, the corporation also confirmed that they would feature Iris Pro graphics, that new integrated graphics technology that Intel has been keeping reasonably shrouded in mystery.
From previous rumors, we've come to believe that Iris Pro will match, or come close to, the integrated GPUs of AMD APUs. Or at least some of them.
We'll have to wait until the fourth quarter before any comparison can be made, and probably until 2015 for mass availability of Broadwell processors.
Still, maybe Iris Pro will finally be worthy of being called integrated GPUs, instead of integrated graphics processors (iGPs). The former are always a lot better than the latter.
Keep in mind that Iris Pro will not impact the high end form at all, since all those PCs will have an add-in adapter from NVIDIA or AMD anyway. It will be a boon to HTPCs and other mini computers though.
That’s about all there is to say about Broadwell. Intel also spoke about the Haswell-E high-performance processor line, which will sell in parallel to it (like Sandy Bridge-E shipped alongside Ivy Bridge and Ivy Bridge-E ships along with Haswell).
The Haswell-E will be the first desktop CPUs with DDR4, and will be paired with the X99 chipset. That's pretty much all there was to say, or at least all that Intel was willing to say.
We suppose that USB 3.0 and SATA 6.0 Gbps, at least, will be supported at last. Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy bridge-E lacked them, being one architecture behind the consumer desktop Haswell line.
Finally, Intel has announced the Devil's Canyon high-end, enthusiast processor, a version of the Haswell K with extra overclocking potential, thanks to a better thermal interface material and support for 9-series chipsets. It's intended for those seeking to establish new overcloking records, and who felt that the material used between the die and the heatspreader of the current-generation Haswell K-series was second-rate.
We will only know more once the arrival date draws closer, and before you ask no, we do not know when it is. Only that Devil's Canyon is supposed to arrive around the middle of the year, so it could mean later second quarter or early third.
