Hardware you can look forward to

If you’re feeling the itch to upgrade your PC, hold off for a moment; there are a few new technologies coming out over the next year that may be worth waiting for.

Intel and AMD both plan to release new technology within the next year – here are the most noteworthy items:

Intel Haswell

Are you still waiting to upgrade to Intel Ivy Bridge? Well you may want to hold off a little longer, maybe up to a year.

According to the rumours Intel is planning on releasing Ivy Bridge’s successor, Haswell, sometime between March and May 2013. Haswell is Intel’s “tock”, a completely new architecture based on the same 22nm manufacturing process Ivy Bridge chips are built on.

A new socket will accompany Haswell on release, LGA 1150. This won’t be compatible with the current socket LGA 1155 used by Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge, which means in less than a year you won’t be able to upgrade your motherboard and keep your current CPU, and vice versa.

So if you’re still on an older socket (LGA 1156, LGA 1366 etc) and feel your machine can handle another year of gaming before upgrading, it may be wise to wait for Haswell.

Intel roadmap

AMD Trinity desktop parts

AMD released the Trinity series of APUs for laptops and ultrap-ortables, with the promise that desktop parts will arrive later in 2012.

Trinity APUs combine CPUs based on the new Piledriver architecture, with GPUs based on the HD7000 series chipset in one package.

They’ve brought support for DDR3, and form part of the AMD accelerated app ecosystem. This ecosystem includes a variety of well known applications such as Adobe Photoshop CS 6, VLC media player and all the major web browsers, which are optimised for use with Trinity APUs.

Trinity also brings a range of new features to the table, including the AMD HD Media Accelerator, Eyefinity, and the ability to crossfire the built in HD7000 series GPU with compatible discreet AMD graphics cards.

For the full Trinity breakdown read the Mygaming overview.

AMD Trinity APU design

AMD Radeon HD 7990

Unveiling at the Computex event in June later this year, the Radeon HD 7990 is AMDs latest attempt at a dual-GPU high-end graphics card.

A DonanimHaber report notes that the HD7990 will feature two unlocked 28nm “Tahiti” GPUs, with a total of 4,096 Graphics Core Next stream processors, 6 GB of GDDR5 memory, and the ability to drive 6-monitor Eyefinity.

Nvidia have already released their high-end dual-GPU card, the GTX 690. The GTX 690 retails for over R13,000 locally, so we’ll have to wait and see how the HD 7990 will match up in terms of price and performance before we get too excited.