Rumour: Intel’s Haswell-E Platform To Bring DDR4 Support and 8 Cores

The guys over at VR-Zone have a long tradition of getting leaks about new Intel platforms quite early and they have published news of Intel’s new Haswell-E platform before we’ve even seen its predecessor Ivy Bridge-E. According to their reports the new Haswell-E platform will hit the market in the second half of 2014. The new Haswell-E CPUs will have 6 or 8 cores, more than the currently available 6 on the Sandy Bridge-E and Ivy Bridge-E platform.

Furthermore these CPUs will boast 20MB of L3 Cache and 16 threads. The TDP may rise slightly to 140W up from 130W, on selected parts, as two extra cores means extra power required despite generational power savings from moving to Haswell. The roadmap also crushes old speculation that 14nm processors would arrive in 2014, as they now appear set for 2015 at the earliest. Interestingly there will be no more quad core parts in this platform like the i7 3820 or i7 4820K as Intel is only offering 6 and 8 core parts with Haswell-E.

The Haswell-E platform itself (Wellsburg) can manage six USB 3.0 ports, eight USB 2.0 ports and ten SATA III 6Gbps ports. There are also 40 PCIe lanes, the same as Ivy Bridge-E and Sandy Bridge-E, and these are all at Generation 3 speeds and are controlled on the processor. The system will support quad channel DDR4 2133MHz memory natively.

Finally performance will be at least 33% better (due to the extra cores) and then if you add generational improvements in the architectures we could see up to 50% more performance over Ivy Bridge-E which is already 10% faster than Sandy Bridge-E. The socket will retail LGA 2011 layout and pins but will be “LGA 2011-3” which has a more efficient design, better package handling and comes with additional wings.

Images courtesy of VR-Zone