Though marketing people will tell you that launches happen exactly when they intend them to, Intel's next-generation CPU architecture, Broadwell, based on 14nm fabrication, is delayed. It should have been shipping now, going by earlier estimates, but we are unlikely to see them in the channel until Q3 this year.
Intel, it seems, isn't under any real pressure to up the processor ante; rival AMD CPUs remain some way behind the current Haswell architecture with regards to premium performance. But as a modest step towards reinvigorating the desktop market, Intel is planning to launch the 9-series motherboard chipset and Haswell refresh chips within the next three months, according to reports.
There's not a whole lot of information on the Haswell refresh, but as the folks over at cpu-world have found out, ShopBLT, an online retailer, has been listing 10 new Haswell chips.
Let's take the processors enthusiasts are most familiar with. The Core i5-4690 is, as far as we can tell, a minor speed-bumped version of the incumbent Core i5-4670. It clocks in 100MHz higher for both base and turbo frequencies... and that's about it. The rumoured Core i7-4790, meanwhile, follows a similar path and adds the same extra 100MHz over the Core i7-4770K.
Pricing seems consistent with the chips available today, intimating that the 'Haswell refresh' CPUs will simply take their place in the pecking order. We can but hope that pricing of presently-available Haswell processors drops a little.
A lack of serious competition from AMD puts Intel in such an advantageous position as to roll out a consumer desktop refresh, and very minor ones at that, almost a year after the launch of the initial raft of 4th Generation Core processors. Let's hope the accompanying 9-series chipsets offer more features and performance.
