Intel Broadwell processors to hit laptops first

Intel’s Broadwell is the successor to Haswell and will introduce more technologies to lower power consumption; it will be fabricated on a 14nonometer process.

However, Broadwell was originally reported to be only shipping in 2015, as Intel is planning to release a Haswell refresh next year.

VR-Zone reports that they are in possession of leaked documents which point to Broadwell being released in Q3/Q4 2014, but not on socketed motherboards.

Broadwell will be available first in laptops, and this makes financial sense to Intel, as they earn money for both the processor and the chipset provided and this will help to leverage the costs involved in jumping to the 14nm production process.

The amount of processors on offer will apparently also differ slightly from the norms we’ve come to expect in the past. Intel’s Broadwell will replace processors in the Core i5 and Core i7 lineup, but there are currently no plans for a Core i3 or Pentium refresh according to the new roadmap.

Intel may be releasing Broadwell-based processors for those families later, as the Celeron lineup will only consist of Ivy Bridge and Haswell designs.

Intel Broadwell ULV processor roadmap

Intel Broadwell Core i7 processor roadmap

Intel Broadwell Y-ULV processor roadmap

For the desktop, the Haswell refresh will provide new chips for the LGA1150 socket, and motherboards shipping today will be provided with a BIOS update to support the new chips.

These are not going to be anything substantially better, but may feature a tweaked Turbo Boost algorithm, and given that the silicon will be more mature at that point, they will also have higher overclocking headroom and possibly lower temperatures.