I'll try to make some predictions about the Broadwell MBPs. Obviously, they will have Broadwell CPUs. The process shrink from 22nm to 14nm means that Intel will be able to pack twice as many transistors into the same die area. In theory, that means Intel could double everything: number of cores, cache sizes, number of execution units, etc. In reality, Intel will almost certainly make the dies a bit smaller in order to keep yields up (and costs down) and to reduce power consumption. Thus the increase in transistors might be somewhere in the area of 50%, on average.
What would Intel do with roughly about 50% more transistors? Generally, add execution units, increase cache sizes, and probably go from dual-core to quad-core for the 28W variants.
So, here are my predictions for the Broadwell MBPs:
- Broadwell CPUs (certain)
- Drop the remaining 13" cMBP (nearly certain)
- Improve battery life (nearly certain)
- Increase the base DRAM from 4GB to 8GB (probable)
- Upgrade from 1600MHz DDR3 to 1866MHz DDR3 (probable)
- Release date between 1 June and 15 November 2014 (probable)
- Offer a quad-core 13" model (probable)
- Drop the discrete GPU completely (probable)
- L3 cache sizes ranging from 4MB to 8MB (probable)
- Increase the base SSD from 128GB to 256GB (maybe)
- Upgrade from HDMI 1.4 to 2.0 (maybe)
- Upgrade from USB 3.0 to 3.1 (maybe)
- Upgrade the 720p FaceTime camera to 1080p (maybe)
- Offer a 32GB DRAM BTO option for the 15" model (unlikely)
- Change the displays in any way (unlikely)
- Offer an SSD more capacious than 1TB (unlikely)
- Changes in dimensions or weight (unlikely)
- DDR4 (no)
- Touch ID (no)