Intel’s Haswell, the successor to Ivy Bridge, is hotly anticipated. The Haswell architecture will be the second instalment of the 22nm process, and is expected to arrive in March 2013 – well before Ivy Bridge-E.
As you’ve probably noticed, AMD has lost competitiveness with Intel. Thus you’d expect Intel might start to cash in on that and raise CPU prices even further. But according to our sources this is not the case, probably due to the fact Intel is competing with its own processors on pricing too.
The lowest end Haswell Quad Core part, the i5 3470 replacement, is rumoured to cost $184 in 1000 tray quantities (OEM price) and $195 for retail boxed versions. Meaning it takes more or less an identical price to current Ivy Bridge parts. These translate into UK prices of about £145.
Of course for the same price Haswell parts will be better performing and have better specifications plus probably lower power consumption.
Speculation also suggests Intel plans to drop dual cores in the desktop market. From Haswell forward, only Quad cores will be made. This would mean no LGA 1150 based Pentiums, Core i3s or Celerons. Instead Intel will push ahead with its Atom platform for low end computing and offer dual cores only in the mobile market, whilst probably continuing production of LGA 1155 Celeron, Pentium and Core i3 processors for as long as demand is there.
Expect to hear a lot more about Haswell as we get closer to the Intel Developer Forum (IDF) on September the 11th to the 13th.
