Intel’s Haswell To Ship In Three BGA Packages

There has been much speculation in the industry about whether Intel will stop making LGA package processors in favour of BGA package processors. Well, this speculation may have some traction in the long term but in the short term we can see that Intel are doing very little with Haswell and the BGA package.

Put simply, BGA packages are those whereby the processor is fused into the motherboard. This means that the processor is not removable and if the processor or motherboard become faulty the entire BGA package of the motherboard and CPU has to be replaced. While the LGA package is what we currently see whereby motherboards and processors are sold separately and you can mix any same socket motherboard with same socket CPU.

Intel’s Haswell was rumoured to be dominated by BGA packages and pessimists were citing the end of the PC market as we know it. Haswell does indeed have BGA packages, but they are minimal in terms of their number and look set to be targeted at Intel’s NUC system only.

The BGA package Haswell processors can be seen in the below table, they are denoted by an “R” in Intel’s Haswell series. They come in quad core variants only, with 65W TDPs and 6 or 4MBs of cache. All feature turbo boost and varying clock speeds depending on how high up the product chain they are placed. Only one model features hyper threading and that is the i7 4770R.

The 65W TDP is important as it is much less than the 84W TDP of the desktop variants. The main selling point is the Intel HD 5200 GT3 graphics which are expected to be miles better than the Intel HD 4600 GT graphics on Haswell LGA processors and significantly better than the HD 4000 graphics on some current Ivy Bridge processors.

The launch is likely to be alongside the Haswell desktop and mobile launch in June sometime. As mentioned Intel will definitely try and push these alongside their NUC (next unit of computing) systems and may have NUCs prefitted with these processors ready to ship on launch.

What are your thoughts on BGA package Haswell processors?

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