14 DAY TRIAL // The announcement of the new Intel Broadwells at this year's Computex left people unimpressed as it was the last model of the Haswells designed for mobile platforms that will come with Intel's Iris Pro Graphics 6200 series and Xeon-based Intel Pro Graphics P6300.
However, there are reports that the future Broadwell Xeons will simply not make it to the market at all because of the short lifespan it will have until the more powerful Skylake-based Xeons come with the much-awaited Purley server platform and simply overshadow the much-weaker Xeon Broadwells.
Although the original plans at Intel were to update the existing "Brickland" and "Grantley" server platforms with the new Xeon E7 v4 Broadwells next year, a sudden lack of any Broadwells from Intel's recent roadmaps coming from BitsAndChips shows that Intel may withdraw the aforementioned microarchitecture with the rapidly advancing "Skylakes."
Although both the new Broadwell and the new "Skylake" were to come with the same 14nm process technology, the Broadwells come with only 24 cores compared with the 28 cores of the "Skylake" Xeon.
An entire industry is halted in anticipation for Intel's Skylake
It's believed that the cancellation of the "Broadwells" is caused by the new “Skylake-EX” and “Skylake-EP” processors coming much earlier than expected, and while the new "Purley" server platform is considered the biggest server platform upgrade in a decade, it's unlikely that Intel will accept wasting any more money by launching an irrelevant, old-generation CPU during one of the worst financial periods for PC sales in the last six years.
IT market analysts emphasize that this trend is also affecting the server platform sales as the Xeons are going through a "limping" period when very few clients wish to invest in old-gen tech when newer and more powerful systems are just around the corner. Things are even worse, it seems as reports from GoParallel show customers cancelling old Xeons in anticipation of the new "Purley" platforms, being convinced on their higher performance and energy efficiency.