What will broad well offer?

[MattRum]

I'd like to know how what broadwell involves? When will the upgrade will be? How it will affect the performance, battery life and other features of rMBP or other potential mac notebooks. It is my understanding that the haswell jump was pretty noticeable. Will this be the same for Broadwell?

 

[827538]

You should try searching the forums as Broadwell is discussed at length.

Haswell was an architecture update (tock) which was designed at increasing battery life and iGPU performance rather than outright performance, Broadwell is a process update (14nm second gen FinFET) also known as a tick. It should improve iGPU performance and reduce power consumption by around 30%, processing wise there won't be much change - not sure about new instructions etc.

Haswell was noticeable as it really boosted battery life, Broadwell will do something similar but due do a process shrinkage rather than an architectural change.
You can expect the next MacBooks to have longer battery life's, a minor performance increase, lower TDP's (less heat output for the same performance) so they should run cooler. They should be out in Q4 2014.

I'm more looking forward to the inclusion of Maxwell as the dGPU in the top end 15" rMBP - that should add some serious graphics performance without increasing the power consumption - around a 50% boost at the same TDP I believe.

Intel's been driving for lower power consumption on it's chips in order to compete in the tablet/ultrabook/laptop market as the desktop market has shrunk and stagnated. That's why performance hasn't really change a great deal since Sandy Bridge while power consumption has come down drastically. Personally I think it's been really good, I just hope starting with Skylake they start to focus a bit more on raw performance again.