Every few months, we get another snapshot at some of Intel's products. This timeline has a rough placement for every segment, from their Internet of Things (IoT) product, the Quark, up to the Xeon E7 v2. While it covers from now through December, it is not designed to be a strict schedule and might contain an error or two.
Image Credit: VR-Zone
First up is Ivy Bridge-EX (Xeon E7 v2). PCMag has an interesting rundown on these parts in depth, although some aspects are a little fuzzy. These 22nm-based chips range from 6 to 15 cores and can access up to 1.5TB of memory, per socket. Intel also claims they will support up to four times the I/O bandwidth for disk and network transactions. Naturally, they have all the usual virtualization and other features that are useful for servers. Most support Turbo Boost and all but one have Hyper-Threading Technology.
Jumping back to the VR-Zone editorial, the timeline suggests that the Quark X1000 will launch in April. As far as I can tell, this is new information. Quark is Intel's ultra low-end SoC that is designed for adding intelligence to non-computing devices. One example given by Intel at CES was a smart baby bottle warmer.
The refresh of Haswell is also expected to happen in April.
Heading into the third quarter, we should see Haswell-E make an appearance for the enthusiast desktop and moderately high-end server. This should be the first time since Sandy Bridge-E (2011) that expensive PCs get a healthy boost to single-threaded performance, clock for clock. Ivy Bridge-E, while a welcome addition, was definitely aimed at reducing power consumption.
Ending the year should be the launch of Airmont at 14nm. The successor to Silvermont, Airmont will be the basis of Cherry Trail tablets and lower end PCs at the very end of the year. Moorefield, which is Airmont for smartphones, is not listed on this roadmap and should not surface until 2015.
Hmm, no mention of Broadwell
Hmm, no mention of Broadwell in 2014, early 2015 .
The “Internet of things”
The “Internet of things” ecosystem is already populated by the little mammalian creatures, so used to living off of the those meager crumbs of margins! What is a big hungry for margins, and needing much more, to feed its cash hungry fabs, Chipzella going to do! The OEMs, once they got from under the cold shadow of the big beast, are not willing to return, to become food for the lumbering colossus, and its need for margins, they know that they have the ability to exist after clouds of dust and debris have blocked out the the light to giant’s food source, big margins, and they can live on so few! The big beast is going to burn off some of its already dwindling fat reserves, trying to entice the clueless, but its too late for the beast to make much inroads, the big rock has dropped, and the bountiful for the picking margins are now just assorted crumbs, a feast for the tiny, but too small for the beast to see.
I think the Haswell-EX is
I think the Haswell-EX is also supposed to run DDR4 and speculation is that the inline execution will be a significant improvement. We’ll see.
I’ve also heard the rumor that Broadwell-k is being configured for an 1150 release late this year or early next. My understanding is that they will have to change the power specs- so they may not want to commit to that yet. ?
$6841.00, for the top of the
$6841.00, for the top of the line 15 core, That’s a middle range Apple trash can, or quite a few Raspberry PIs, or pies for that matter. I would love to see a PI vs Xeon(15 core) benchmark one Xeon vs how ever many Raspberry PIs $6841.00 would buy, flops vs flops, etc.