Intel Roadmap Says Unlocked Broadwell and Skylake From Q2 2015

VR-Zone have published a new Intel roadmap which reveals some interesting details about their consumer CPU plans. The roadmap reveals that we will be seeing Haswell-E “X99” in Q3, which is in the July-September time frame. The roadmap also reveals that Broadwell will launch alongside Skylake-S, with S denoting that it is the desktop variant of Skylake. As far as we can infer the Broadwell CPUs will be unlocked which means that the Skylake-S CPUs will not. Given that Skylake-S locked CPUs will be hitting the market it seems unlikely there will be locked Broadwell CPUs otherwise Intel will be saturating its product base with two different SKUs.

The simultaneous release of Skylake locked CPUs and Broadwell unlocked CPUs is an interesting tactic from Intel and one that I don’t think we’ve ever seen before. Skylake is the successor to Broadwell, or the “tock” microarchitecture redesign based on the same 14nm process. To put it into context it would be like Intel launching Ivy Bridge unlocked CPUs alongside Haswell locked CPUs, it just seems like a strange tactic but lets see how it all plays out over the coming months.

Source: VR-Zone

Image courtesy of VR-Zone