Article by Kevin Lee
So much for seeing the high-end "Extreme" Broadwell processors anytime soon—or anytime in 2015 at all, in fact. The VR Zone (a Chinese tech site) reports that Intel’s high-end desktop Broadwell-E CPUs, the successor to Haswell-E which was released back in August, will supposedly come out in the first few months of 2016 rather than fall 2015.
After Broadwell has been delayed several times due to manufacturing issues, it’s not surprising to hear that we’ll have to wait a long while for top-end parts. Intel CEO Brian Krzanich promised to deliver Broadwell CPUs in 2014, but those will be lower-power Core M chips. The more powerful desktop Core i5 and i7 chips ideal for gaming won't be out until sometime in 2015.
The VR Zone report doesn't specify the exact reasons Intel's pushing the Extreme chips back to 2016, but it does give us a glimpse at what Intel’s next high-end chip will entail. VR-Zone confirms some previous reports that Broadwell-E chips reuse the existing LGA2011v3 socket and stick with the X99 chipset.
The big draw of Broadwell chips is that they will be made with a new, smaller 14-nanometer silicon fabrication process, which should reduce power consumption and in turn cooler running CPUs. Compared to the 22nm process used to create Haswell chips, Intel will be able to produce boards that are 25-percent smaller.
Broadwell should be an very heat and power efficient line of processors, but similar to the way Ivy Bridge was a shrunken down version of Sandy Bridge, Broadwell is only an incremental update from the Haswell. Skylake, meanwhile, will represent an all new architecture with a new chip design and possibly introduce wireless charging and data streaming.
