14 DAY TRIAL // Some time ago, we learned that Intel would refresh its entire central processing unit collection this year, and that most of them would come out in the second quarter of 2014, which has just begun. Now we have the confirmation.
Intel will replace its entire Haswell collection of central processing units with a sort of fourth generation and a half, so to speak.
There will be two types of chips: the K-suffix, which will have unlocked multipliers (and, thus, overclocking potential), and the ones lacking the K at the end.
The K chips won't come out until the third quarter of 2014. The others will come out sooner though, this quarter (April-June).
There are 25 of them, and their clocks have been confirmed thanks to the CPU support lists of various motherboard.
There are dual-core and quad-core Celeron, Pentium and Core i3/i5/i7 series processors on the way, with normal TDPs (thermal design powers) or low-power specs.
Not all the chips have Hyper-Threading support (which turns the physical cores into twice the number of logical cores, or threads). In fact, most do not.
Still, despite that, they should be able to handle normal workloads, especially the quad-core ones, considering the clocks of 2.8 GHz to 3.7 GHz.
Contrary to what you might think, it's not a high-end Core i7 that bears that last frequency. Instead, it is the Core i3-4360, a quad-core with 4 threads, 4 MB cache memory and 54W TDP.
That said, the L3 cache memory can be of 2 MB to 6 MB and the TDP goes from 35W (for the chips with a T suffix, like Core i3-4150T, Pentium G3240T, and Core i5-4590T) to 84W (Core i5-4590, 4 cores, 4 threads, 3.3 GHz, 6 MB cache).
The odd one out, so to speak, is the Core i7-4790T, with 4 cores, 8 threads, 2.7 GHz clock and 8 MB cache, but 45W TDP instead of 35W. There is a 35W Core i7 though: Core i7-4785T, with 2.2 GHz clock but otherwise similar features.
All in all, the Haswell Refresh processors (all 25 of them) have 100 MHz extra speed compared to the existing series and are meant to be installed on the same motherboard, powered by the LGA 1150 socket.
Core i5-4690T, Core i7-4785T and i7-4790T have 200 MHz advantage though, and there is even an exception in the Core i5-4790T, which has twice as many cores as the i5-4570T but 900 MHz less speed (2 GHz).