News - Intel Haswell CPUs to be officially launched on 3rd June

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That’s the day before Computex 2013 in Taipei.

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Cracking, roll it on. 2013 is a good tech year, the Nexus 4 is finally the smartphone I always wanted my smartphone to be (but before was never fast/fluid enough) and I hope a ULV Haswell tablet/convertible will be the portable PC I always wanted, not too heavy (ideally <1 Kg), decent battery and full Windows without so many "well it's fine so long as you don't want to X..." caveats. Pretty keen to see how the new Atom turns out later this year too, might be excellent for smaller tablets and embedded devices...

This is a nice step forward. Especially for portable systems. Though I don't see much point in upgrading from high end i5's and i7's if you're using discrete GPU technology. I'll be skipping this generation. My 3570K and 670's should at least allow me to skip the next generation.

Since they started putting graphics on their CPUs, they seem to have forgotten to work on improving the CPUs.

If it's 10% more performance stock than Ivy, but the overclockability of Sandy or Lynnfield, I'll be a happy bunny. I shall hold off judgement until we know that.

Can't wait to see what motherboards are incoming, specifically mATX and miniITX as one of those is going to be my next project. I would really like to see a Creative Labs audio chip on a MiniITX board then that would 100% swing me to using that form factor.

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Originally Posted by AGTDenton

Can't wait to see what motherboards are incoming, specifically mATX and miniITX as one of those is going to be my next project. I would really like to see a Creative Labs audio chip on a MiniITX board then that would 100% swing me to using that form factor.

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Use an external DAC??

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Originally Posted by Roobubba

Since they started putting graphics on their CPUs, they seem to have forgotten to work on improving the CPUs.

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They need to catch up with AMD. How much do you think the Sony and Microsoft console contracts are worth?

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Originally Posted by CAT-THE-FIFTH

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Originally Posted by AGTDenton

Can't wait to see what motherboards are incoming, specifically mATX and miniITX as one of those is going to be my next project. I would really like to see a Creative Labs audio chip on a MiniITX board then that would 100% swing me to using that form factor.

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Use an external DAC??

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I agree. I have an external DAC and using ASIO direct output (or direct sound if you don't have Creative ASIO), the sound is phenomenol.

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Originally Posted by shaithis

They need to catch up with AMD. How much do you think the Sony and Microsoft console contracts are worth?

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AMD is in trouble. they the ones need to catch up on the PC side of things

The console CPU contract probably not as much as you might think, probably only a few tens of $ margin per unit at most if they're lucky... which will rapidly decline as the part ages. How many consoles? Current XBox and PS3 have sold 150 million ish total in 8 years or something? So AMD might optimistically be looking at a billion or two profit but spread over nearly a decade, its not going to be that massive. Better value might come from the brand boost but its only really nerds who'll know/care it has AMD inside and they'd probably already know to consider AMD chips.

If I'm honest, I don't think Haswell will be as successful as Ivy or even Sandy Bridge. Sure, it's a performance increase but by how much?

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Originally Posted by shaithis

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Originally Posted by Roobubba

Since they started putting graphics on their CPUs, they seem to have forgotten to work on improving the CPUs.

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They need to catch up with AMD. How much do you think the Sony and Microsoft console contracts are worth?

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Those contracts can actually end up hurting a company. Huge amounts of manufacturing space has to be dedicated to the production of said chips at near cost price. This keeps prices for their other lines up and hurts R&D.

There's very little money in these console contracts as far as I can tell.

Indeed, you get a lot of turnover, but precious little profit.

It's only really a good idea if you have excess manufacturing space.

Firstly,a third party fab produces the chips. Secondly,AMD gets paid for its development work and gets a licensing fee per chip(most likely). Thirdly,it is a stable income. Fourthly,AMD has got its graphics IP in all three of the next generation consoles and CPU IP in one perhaps two of them. Fifthly,the PS4 SOC appears to be the first HSA enabled part in hardware,the first GCN2.0 part and the first AMD part to use stacked NAND.

All of this work was due to the PS4 contract and this tech will find its way into AMD products. Sony has basically helped defer the R and D costs of some of the important tech AMD needs to use anyway,and for a relatively small company with limited R and D costs,it is useful.

It is hilarious how the console wins are being turned into anything but a good thing for AMD.

He didn't say they were bad for AMD, he implied that they might not have been good for Intel.

A good contract for AMD != A good contract for Intel.

Didn't read like that for me TBH. Either way, no, consoles/mobiles etc generally don't offer the huge margins Intel simply must have, but neither do Intel have the graphics experience of AMD/Nvidia. And Nvidia can't offer you an x86 CPU (even if they wanted to, thanks to Intel essentially banning it) or anything like HSA. They can offer you an ARM platform, although the graphics architecture is more dated than that used on the 360 and despite 'console quality' marketing guff, still not as fast, and they have a reputation of failing to deliver on time and missing power/volume/performance targets. Still, a 'big' graphics processor combined with ARM might have been an option.

If AMD didn't think it would be profitable, or was very risky, they wouldn't have taken 3+ major contracts along the same lines. And despite what some people thing, AMD know the market better than a few sore fanboys on forums.