Broadwell not coming to Desktops

[Mr. Dee]

Well, it looks like Broadwell even be a more significant upgrade for laptops since Intel doesn't plan to make it available for desktop systems. Even more reason hold out of the Broadwell Retina MacBook Pro:

The report from Fudzilla, using unnamed sources, says that Intel's new plan is to release an all-new processor design for the desktop market every two years. In 2014, the report claims that Intel will offer a slightly improved and optimized Haswell CPU for desktop PCs. The next major new design won't come until 2015, when Intel plans to launch Skylake, which like Broadwell will use a 14-nm manufacturing process.

Source

 

[leman]

"Report from Fudzilla, using unnamed sources"... Nothing to see here, move along

 

[dusk007]

Most roadmaps lately showed that Intel doesn't plan any Broadwell for Desktop.
They focus on power efficiency, mobile computing, trying to push the average TDP lower and lower. Desktop was about performance and the truth is the last few times there was actually very little performance gain. If you run a Sandy Bridge desktop today there is very little reason to upgrade to even a Haswell. Just makes very little sense for Intel to focus on that market and they'd really only hand out placebos anyway.
Need more performance on Desktop just over clock a little. Broadwell would probably be even worse in that department if the trend from Sandy onwards keeps holding.
Atom and Notebooks need 14nm much more then Desktop.

 

[Mr MM]

Most roadmaps lately showed that Intel doesn't plan any Broadwell for Desktop.
They focus on power efficiency, mobile computing, trying to push the average TDP lower and lower. Desktop was about performance and the truth is the last few times there was actually very little performance gain. If you run a Sandy Bridge desktop today there is very little reason to upgrade to even a Haswell. Just makes very little sense for Intel to focus on that market and they'd really only hand out placebos anyway.
Need more performance on Desktop just over clock a little. Broadwell would probably be even worse in that department if the trend from Sandy onwards keeps holding.
Atom and Notebooks need 14nm much more then Desktop.

pretty much that, aside the fact that desktop is market with steeper decline than mobile

but haswell EX and Broadwell EX seem to be on plan, thus favouring the enthusiast and pro crowd

 

[Atomic Walrus]

I think this could be the right move on Intel's part. The last two updates have been disappointing for desktop builders. Sandy Bridge was a decent overclocker, meaning it would produce manageable amounts of heat as the voltage and clock speeds increase. In the quest for power efficiency, both Ivy and Haswell become more difficult to overclock. Their temperatures ramp up more quickly as voltage increases, limiting maximum clock speeds before temperatures become excessive even with high end cooling solutions.

In practice this means that many people are running Sandy Bridge desktops that can match Haswell's performance due to the extra overclocking headroom. Obviously Intel needs to stop trying to apply the mobile optimizations they're working on so aggressively to the desktop space.

The desktop market is in decline, but there are still places you can sell high end chips:
-People who need more cores for serious work will buy -E chips. These are already a gen behind at all times.
-PC gamers buy top of the line CPUs, GPUs, etc. on a regular basis. But you can't sell a serious PC gamer a CPU with iGPU upgrades, idle power efficiency boosts, and lower overclocking headroom because it's exactly the opposite of what we need. The extra cores of the E series are wasted in gaming and not worth the price premium.
-Professionals on a budget may have similar needs to the gamers, but not be able to afford a $900 -E CPU with extra cores that may not always be useful.

 

[mslide]

Sounds like a good move to me. Seems like lately the only reason to upgrade a processor is to get a better integrated GPU but if you're using a desktop and care about GPU performance, you have a discrete GPU.

I wonder if Apple will switch the iMacs to mobile processors so they have more of a reason to refresh them every year. If not, I wonder if they'd reduce the typical refresh cycle to two years.

 

[dusk007]

The desktop market is in decline, but there are still places you can sell high end chips:
-People who need more cores for serious work will buy -E chips. These are already a gen behind at all times.

The E-Series has since its inception been behind. It is because of the small market and they are more or less server chips moved to the desktop and those are slower just because they need more time for validation.

-PC gamers buy top of the line CPUs, GPUs, etc. on a regular basis. But you can't sell a serious PC gamer a CPU with iGPU upgrades, idle power efficiency boosts, and lower overclocking headroom because it's exactly the opposite of what we need. The extra cores of the E series are wasted in gaming and not worth the price premium.
-Professionals on a budget may have similar needs to the gamers, but not be able to afford a $900 -E CPU with extra cores that may not always be useful.

The problem is those kind of people aren't all that big of a market overall. Not everybody is a gamer and even fewer want high end rigs and many are happy with consoles. They served to the high end market more to be in the news for brand recognition than for making money. The E-Series is supposed to be around for that now.
For gamers lately CPUs also don't really matter. Any buying guide says to go no higher then the mainstream quad cores. Developers aim to serve all the people and CPU requirements don't scale well so they must low enough to run well on notebooks. Desktop CPUs are overpowered in most games anyway.

 

[Atomic Walrus]

The E-Series has since its inception been behind. It is because of the small market and they are more or less server chips moved to the desktop and those are slower just because they need more time for validation.
The problem is those kind of people aren't all that big of a market overall. Not everybody is a gamer and even fewer want high end rigs and many are happy with consoles. They served to the high end market more to be in the news for brand recognition than for making money. The E-Series is supposed to be around for that now.
For gamers lately CPUs also don't really matter. Any buying guide says to go no higher then the mainstream quad cores. Developers aim to serve all the people and CPU requirements don't scale well so they must low enough to run well on notebooks. Desktop CPUs are overpowered in most games anyway.

My point was that it's a waste of money to upgrade your desktop CPUs to each year's new architecture if that architecture only brings mobile features like power optimization and iGPU performance. It's much more cost effective to simply release more powerful versions of the previous architecture, because more raw CPU power is generally all the desktop users want.

As far as the gamers vs. CPUs point... for mainstream gamers I suppose you're probably correct. The gamers I interact with are playing (for example) Battlefield 3(4) at 120 fps on large 64-player maps, and in a case like that CPU performance is the limiting factor, since GPUs can scale up with additional parallel processing but games rarely even take advantage of 4 cores properly. I realize that in practice that's an extremely small market, more of a bragging rights target than an actual sales concern.

 

[dusk007]

That is true all that really matters for gamers in clock speed and a fast CPU Core. Everything around that doesn't really matter and neither do new extra instructions like AVX. Ever since Sandy Bridge they changed virtually nothing that would really help gamers other than clock speed.
They could add more L3 cache if they had more or any pressure from AMD.
Otherwise for a gamer it does more to just invest into better cooling or even water cooling and get just some K Series CPU.

You are right quite often people underestimate the requirement for CPU performance because many benchmarks aren't really CPU heavy. Bigger Starcraft battles usually also bring a CPU to its knees on 8 player maps while the GPU barely breaks a sweat. I suppose with PS4 and Xbox better 4+ core support should be comming. On the other hand they cannot go crazy with those rather slow cores either. Not likely that CPU requirements will grow a lot in the near future. Afaik they want to use more cloud for all that multiplayer stuff and offload some AI and whatever isn't too latency dependent.