According to VR-Zone, an Intel roadmap has surfaced which outlines the upper end of the company’s CPU product line through the end of 3rd Quarter 2013. The most interesting albeit also most confusing entry is the launch of Ivy Bridge-E processors in the quarter after the Haswell mainstream parts.

So apparently the lack of high-performance CPU competition unhooked Intel’s tick-tock-clock.

The latest Intel CPU product roadmap outlines the company’s expected product schedule through to the end of Q3 2013. The roadmap from last quarter revealed that Intel’s next architecture, Haswell, would be released in the second quarter of 2013 with only Sandy Bridge-E SKUs to satisfy the enthusiasts who want the fastest processors and the most available RAM slots. It was unclear what would eventually replace SBE as the enthusiast part and what Intel expects for their future release cycles.

I can Haswell-E’zburger?

(Photo Credit: VR-Zone)

Latest rumors continue to assert that Sandy Bridge-E X79 chipset-based motherboards will be able to support Ivy Bridge-E with a BIOS update.

The downside: personally, not a big fan of upgrading CPUs frequently.

In the past I have never kept a motherboard and replaced a CPU. While I have gone through the annoyance of applying thermal paste – and guessing where Arctic Cooling stains will appear over the next 2 weeks – I tend to even just use the default thermal tape which comes with the stock coolers. I am not just cheap or lazy either; I simply tend to not feel a jump in performance unless I allow three to five years between CPU product cycles to pass by.

But that obviously does not reflect all enthusiasts.

But how far behind on the enthusiast architectures will Intel allow themselves to get? Certainly someone with my taste in CPU upgrades should not wait 8-10 years to upgrade our processors if this doubling of time-between-releases continues?

What do you think is the future of Intel’s release cycle? Is this a one-time blip trying to make Ivy Bridge scale up or do you expect that Intel will start releasing progressively more infrequently on the upper end?