We’re stuck with Intel’s underwhelming Haswell for a while

An official-looking roadmap that VR-Zone leaked seems to point out that Intel’s Haswell processor won’t be replaced with Broadwell next year.

The roadmap paints a dismal picture if you were already disappointed in Intel’s Haswell family, at least on the desktop. Haswell is part of a new generation of Intel products that bring a number of power saving measures to laptops and desktops, extending Intel’s performance and efficiency lead in the mobile space.

However, many desktop enthusiasts aren’t satisfied with the slight speed and efficiency jump. Haswell is a great upgrade for users still on PGA478 and LGA775 hardware and it will also be a great benefit to users on LGA1156 and LGA1366 sockets, as those have been dead sockets for a good few years. Sandy and Ivy Bridge users will see no discernible performance boost to their gaming or daily activities and many won’t feel the need to upgrade.

Intel 2014 roadmap

The roadmap brings some good news if you were looking for an upgrade this year but aren’t interested in Haswell or Ivy Bridge or anything from AMD. Ivy Bridge-E will be coming to the LGA2011 socket in Q4 2013 and will be replaced by Haswell-E, using a new LGA2011 socket with the rumoured X99 chipset.

Haswell is now rumoured to only receive a product refresh around Q2 2014 and will come with a revamped 9-series chipset. The new chipset will offer SATA Express support for a larger number of motherboards (its currently limited to the Z87 chipset) and will also launch with improvements to Intel’s RST (Rapid Storage Technolgy) for solid state drives, as well as new security features.

Contrary to what we’ve been lead to believe, Broadwell will only launch for the desktop in 2015 and will only then swap up to the 14nm process. It seems Intel’s Tick-Tock strategy is beginning to falter as they run next to Moore’s Law, which dictates that the number of transistors in a given area, and therefore the theoretical performance, will double roughly every two years.

At some point, the transistors will become so tightly packed that the heat given off will simply melt anything it comes into contact with and that’s expected to happen once we aim for the 5nm process.

AMD 2013 updated APU roadmap

This is in stark contrast to AMD’s roadmap. The company this year launched its Kabini and Temash processors and also announced that Kaveri, along with socket FM2+ motherboards and A78 and A88 chipsets, will be available later this year and is already shipping to partners for testing.

Next year its expected that AMD rolls out Steamroller to more products and revamps their high-end desktop lineup with a new socket, new chipset and FX processors with Steamroller cores. AMD has not mentioned any performance jumps for the next-generation, but currently Kabini is 50% faster than Brazos at a slower same clock speed (1.5GHz to 1.6GHz respectively).