Intel Corp (INTC)

[Colonel Sanders]

Haswell - Only in late 2013?

From VR-Zone and Nebojsa Novakovic

http://vr-zone.com/articles/idf-sf-2012-haswell-only-in-late-2013-no-competition-yet-what-to-do.../17171.html#

Despite all that, the Haswell-focused - and, mind you, power- not performance-focused at that - keynotes imply late 2013 Haswell delivery in those 'Core' parts for UltraBooks and desktops, compared to the expected early 2013. Whether Intel needs more time to fine tune the power states and bring down the power consumption to 10W on UltraBooks, or simply there is no desktop & mobile PC CPU competition worthy retiring the existing Ivy Bridge parts early, is another question.

CPU performance wise, keep in mind that, unless you use its new instruction enhancements, the Haswell core is expected to be only 10% faster clock for clock on average than Ivy Bridge for the existing codes. The GPU should be a little extra faster, even for the mainstream GT2 version, but still, these are not massive improvements - especially since the desktop GT3 version with L4 cache for the GPU seems to be off chart now... OK, Linpack would gain something like three quarters extra if you re-optimise it for Haswell FMA fused multiply add instructions.

So, in that sense, both the delay and the power-focused talk make sense. As there won't be a noticeable general application performance - same as in IVB vs SNB - there's no substantial performance benefit for the user from switching the generations, but there will be enough power saving to justify the move.