14 DAY TRIAL // For months, now, we've known that Intel intends to release a new collection of Haswell central processing units, but the company has never actually said when the chips will come out. Now, though, we finally know.
Granted, the information does not exactly come from an official source, but at least we have more to go on than before.
According to Hermitage Akihabara, Intel will formally launch its new range of central processing units on May 10.
The new chips will all be compatible with the LGA 1150 socket, provided to motherboards by the Intel Z97 Express chipset.
The mainboards will probably come out a bit sooner than the chips themselves, by a week or so perhaps, or they will debut at the same time. It could go either way.
The 9-series chipset will give them support for M.2 SSDs, a new form factor, long and somewhat akin to DDR3 DIMM modules, but with the small connector on one of the narrow edges.
M.2 SSDs also happens to have very high read/write speeds, or 1,000 MB/s even. Well beyond the 500-600 MB/s of SATA ones.
Back to the CPUs, though. The Haswell refresh range will have 25 members to start with, and not all of them are Core-series units.
Sure, the Core i3, Core i5 and Core i7 CPUs account for most of the series, but there are three Celeron units and five Pentium chips as well.
The core count alternates between two and four, and while most of the processors have Hyper-threading support (twice the number of logical cores, or threads, than physical cores), some don't, most notably the Core i5, Celeron and Pentium units.
All in all, the Haswell refresh range of CPUs will be a curious thing, but it will deliver on all implied expectations. Well, the one expectation everyone has, which is higher performance. While there is an exception or two, all processors have 100 MHz extra clock speed compared to the current-generation CPUs they will replace.
To elaborate, Core i5-4690T, Core i7-4785T and i7-4790T have 200 MHz advantage, while the Core i5-4790T foregoes the extra speed in favor of a double core count.
We have detailed the Intel Haswell refresh CPU range previously, so we won't go into details again. Suffice to say, international retail channels will have to accommodate a bunch of newcomers next month, with 2 MB to 6 MB cache memory and 35W to 84W TDP (thermal design power).