Broadwell

[John P. Myers]

Intel's CEO promises Broadwell available in time for the holidays.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2014/05/18/us-intel-chips-idUSBREA4H08P20140518

[DrPop]

Hmmm...wonder how it will compare for O/C ability and crunching vs Haswell? This is die shrink to 14nm, right?

[John P. Myers]

Hmmm...wonder how it will compare for O/C ability and crunching vs Haswell? This is die shrink to 14nm, right?

Right. So far they're claiming 30% less power usage than Haswell and the ability to get Iris Pro graphics plus the 128MB L4 cache on the high-end CPUs. Also adding the ADX instruction set which improves performance of arbitrary-precision integers (a variable type whose size is limited only by the amount of RAM available, not just 32 or 64 bits).

[DrPop]

Hmmm...but we will be stuck with DDR3 RAM still, while X99 + Haswell-e gets DDR4? Wonder if that would even matter for crunching scenarios?:confused:

[John P. Myers]

Yep still DDR3 and still socket 1150 so it'll still work with the Z97 boards you can get today. DDR4 will matter, just don't be in any hurry to grab some. Gotta wait for the latencies to come down.

[DrPop]

Do you think they would make a future revision to Socket 1150 motherboards to pair DDR4 with Broadwell, or will we have to wait for Skylake and a new socket for DDR4 in mainstream? If so, almost makes X99 and Haswell-e sound interesting... but probably not as efficient as Broadwell on the regular socket, and I *really* need to build for efficiency in the future. ;)

[John P. Myers]

Do you think they would make a future revision to Socket 1150 motherboards to pair DDR4 with Broadwell, or will we have to wait for Skylake and a new socket for DDR4 in mainstream?

There's a chance they might offer both DDR3 and DDR4 for Broadwell, but DDR4 wouldn't come til much later after release. They did the same thing with socket 775 where you could use either DDR2 or DDR3 depending on which board you wanted. I wouldn't hold your breath though ;) Skylake for sure.

[Fire$torm]

What about the built-in (Intel Insider (http://blogs.intel.com/technology/2011/01/intel_insider_-_what_is_it_no/)) DRM spy crap? Has Intel done away with that mess in Broadwell?