Intel’s Haswell i5 and i7 line-ups leaked

I’m actually rather excited about the next CPU to come from the Intel labs, especially after being bombarded with info at this year’s Intel Developer Forum. And now Chinese site, VR-Zone, has posted up a leaked datasheet purporting to display the full details of the upcoming Haswell i5 and i7 lineups.

The new chips will still be running on the same 22nm production process, but with a new architecture that should see the graphics performance of the HD 4600 graphics components doubling.

That should give us some rather tasty-performing Ultrabooks, and with the upgraded GT3E version of the HD graphics on the mobile side we should get some svelte gaming laptops too.

One of the interesting points is the increase in TDP from the 77W of the Ivy Bridge up to 84W in the new Haswell chips. I expect that’s mostly down to the beefier graphics components with higher clockspeeds.

Sadly there’s no boost in the general clockspeed of the CPUs themselves. We’re still limited to 3.5GHz for the top-end i7-4770K and 3.4GHz for the i5-4670K.

It’s not a surprise to see Intel isn’t upping the core count either – sticking to four cores/eight threads for the i7 series and four cores/four threads for the i5.
The VR-Zone story also goes on to say the dual-core i3 variants will likely tip up in the third quarter of 2013, with the server-based Ivy Bridge-E chips also set to make an eventual appearance around then too.

The Ivy Bridge-E CPUs are the massive chips set for the LGA 2011 X79 boards. We can pretty much ignore those, however, due to their likely £600+ cost and limited gaming performance. But still, that’s the only way you’re going to get six-core Intel CPUs in your gaming rig.