Last year at around this time, Intel was releasing its brand-new Haswell CPU architecture
and its 8-series chipsets out into the world for back-to-school season.
About a year before that, it was doing the same for its Ivy Bridge
architecture and 7-series chipsets. This year, we're getting more new
chipsets, but they aren't coming with a new CPU architecture—just some
mildly refreshed Haswell processors.
AnandTech has done some thorough testing
on some of the new Haswell desktop CPUs, and they're about as exciting
as those 100MHz clock speed increases over last year's chips would lead
you to believe.
We'll get to the new chipsets in a moment, but first let's
talk about the elephant in the room: Intel's near-silence on the
next-generation Broadwell CPUs. We've had a few snippets of information
about the company's next CPU architecture, but since announcing a delay late last year
the company has said little on the issue. Mass production was supposed
to ramp up in the first quarter of 2014, and that quarter has come and
gone.
The latest leaked Broadwell roadmap says we won't see those processors before late 2014
.
The main culprit is Intel's new 14nm manufacturing
process, which will be responsible for most of Broadwell's performance
increases and power usage decreases, but which also appears to be
holding up the rollout. The last leaked roadmap
from October of 2013 shows desktop Broadwell chips launching in late
2014 into 2015, and its accurate information about the new Haswell chips
and chipsets lends it legitimacy.
So we're left to wait, and the PC OEMs are left selling
systems that are internally similar to the ones they launched this time
last year. Haswell remains a reasonably compelling architecture, but
Broadwell's improved graphics performance and the reported 30 percent
reduction in power usage would have made the new laptops, convertibles,
and tablets of Computex more interesting.
The chipsets
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The 8-series and 9-series chipsets both use the LGA 1150 socket on the
desktop. For now, this allows 9-series chipsets to use existing Haswell
CPUs. In the future, it will theoretically let 8-series chipsets use
Broadwell CPUs, as long as your motherboard manufacturer provides an
appropriate BIOS update, though this isn't a given.
Intel's chipsets improve every year in a methodical and
predictable way, though the number of slight variations available can be
just as confusing as the company's unendingly-segmented CPU lineup. The
new 9-series chipsets take everything that was present in the previous
8-series chipsets and stacks a bit more on top of them. Today Intel is
talking specifically about the Z97 and H97 variants of the chipset (both
are intended for high-end desktops) but most of the capabilities should
be available in all desktop and mobile versions. The primary difference
between these two is that Z97 supports processor overclocking when
paired with an unlocked Intel CPU, while H97 does not.
Chipsets are the glue that holds your computer together,
and they handle the bulk of the communication between your CPU, hard
drive, and any external peripherals. The 9-series chipsets offer most of
the same connectivity options as the preceding 8-series chipsets: a
total of 14 USB ports (up to six of those can be USB 3.0), up to six
SATA III ports, an integrated gigabit Ethernet controller, and a total
of eight PCI Express 2.0 lanes for connectivity to other peripherals
like Wi-Fi adapters and SSDs (more on that in a moment).
As in the previous-generation chipsets, the CPU handles
some of the heavy lifting in situations where fast communication and low
latency are important. Standard Haswell desktop CPUs include 16 PCI
Express 3.0 lanes for communication with dedicated GPUs, a DDR3-1600
memory controller, and an integrated GPU that will drive up to three
displays simultaneously. Broadwell should be substantially similar.
Support for DDR4 memory won't come to Intel's consumer CPUs until
Skylake, the follow-up to Broadwell, so don't believe those rumors about Apple (or anyone else) including DDR4 in its MacBooks this year.
Enlarge/ M.2 drives are first-class citizens now. Intel
The new features in 9-series chipsets focus on speeding up
your storage, whether you've got a fast SSD or a cheaper hybrid drive.
The new chipsets now support the M.2 storage specification
for small-form-factor SSDs, and the chipsets use two PCI Express lanes
to give the drives up to 1GB per second of bandwidth. This is a nice
increase from the 600MB per second available to SATA III drives. A
handful of PC OEMs are already shipping products that use PCI
Express-connected storage rather than mSATA for their SSDs, and you can
see our 2013 MacBook Air review
for the kinds of speed increases it can enable for modern drives. This
addition is going to be especially useful for Ultrabooks and mini
desktops like the NUC,
but we wouldn't be surprised to see M.2 connectors show up on more
full-size motherboards alongside the usual SATA ports. For
motherboards with a little more space, OEMs can use two PCI Express
lanes can also be used to enable one of the different types of SATA Express ports that can use the faster 1GB per second speeds.
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The Smart Response SSD caching feature is being tweaked to support
hybrid drives that combine a spinning HDD and flash memory into the same
package.
Intel
Next, Intel's Smart Response Technology (SRT) feature has
received an upgrade. SRT allows you to use a small, solid-state cache
that's 16GB or larger in size alongside a traditional mechanical hard
drive to speed up launch times for your most frequently-used
applications while providing a larger, cheaper pool of storage than a
regular solid-state drive. Previously, the feature required separate
solid-state and mechanical hard drives connected to separate connectors.
Now, SRT supports hybrid hard drives with integrated flash storage,
obviating the need for different drives. PCs can also use a single SSD
cache to support both SRT and the separate-but-related Rapid Start Technology, which uses the SSD cache to speed up hibernation by dumping the contents of RAM to the flash memory rather than the HDD.
The last new feature is an odd fit for a desktop motherboard—Intel's newest Atom processors include something called Device Protection Technology,
which (among a few other things) prevents "unauthroized boot loaders"
from working on Intel-powered Android tablets. The 9-series chipsets
introduce this feature to Core-powered systems with the refreshed
Haswell CPUs.
Enlarge/
Device Protection Technology and Boot Guard are better suited for
Android devices than PCs, but they're coming to the desktop anyway.
Intel
These booting mechanisms are ostensibly included to
prevent a malware-infected bootloader from damaging your system or
stealing your data, but they can reduce your PC's flexibility by
limiting the operating systems you can install on it. If we had to
guess, we'd say that features like this and Secure Boot
will continue to be optional (or, at least, disable-able) on most
desktops and laptops. This feature is more likely intended to encourage
development of high-end, Haswell- and Broadwell-powered Android tablets,
convertibles, laptops, and desktops.
The inclusion of an Android-centric feature in a briefing
about desktop motherboards really drives home where Intel's
attentions are focused nowadays. Even though these chipsets include new
things that will benefit both desktops and laptops, they'll be the most
useful in computers where space is at a premium. Intel has been focusing
on mobile devices for a few years now, prioritizing reductions in power
consumption over increases in performance. Today's chipset announcement
and some new overclocker-friendly processor options
are meant to keep Intel's desktop users happy, but the company is still
focused largely on thin-and-light laptops, convertibles, and tablets.
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