14 DAY TRIAL // Information about the next generation of high-end central processing units (CPUs) from Intel has been trickling over to the Internet for weeks now, even months, but now we have a little more data to share with you all.
And it's all thanks to Digitimes, a Taiwanese news and rumor website: the first batch of Haswell_E CPUs will have a price of $1,000 / €1,000, or thereabouts.
That sounds like a lot, and it is, but it's also kind of expected, because Haswell-E units will be the best of the best.
In fact, they will be so good that they won't be aimed at regular consumers. Sure, they'll be available via retail, but their spec level will make them best suited for hardcore workstations and high-end servers.
In any event, motherboards based on the X99 chipset will be compatible with the chips.
That said, Haswell-E processors will be manufactured on the same 22 nm manufacturing process as Haswell and will be shipped in X and K versions (the X being the strongest of the lot).
We actually explored this already, a while before Christmas came around, when the first Haswell-E engineering sample was pictured (an 8-core chip at 3 GHz).
Since we’re on the subject, we may as well give a rundown of the technical details known so far: Hyper-Threading support (double logical core count compared to physical one), Turbo Boost 2.0 dynamic overclocking technology, PCI Express 3.0 support and DDR4.
DDR4 modules will have a starting speed of 2133 MHz, a level that DDR3 can only attain through extreme overclocking done in the factory or by owners themselves.
Intel Haswell-E central processing units will be released at some point in the third quarter of 2014 and will replace the Ivy Bridge-E, just like Ivy Bridge-E replaced Sandy Bridge-E earlier this year.