From DailyTech: Intel Corp. (INTC) continues to struggle to leverage its substantial semiconductor process lead on the mobile front as sales of traditional PCs decline. The good news is that the jury is out on whether this slump is permanent, or simply the result of certain factors such as consumer difficulty with Microsoft Corp.'s (MSFT) Windows 8 and the rapid expansion of tablet sales.
The hardest hit segment of Intel's business has been PC desktop sales.
Much as Intel has looked to Ultrabooks to revive laptop sales, at the 2014 Game Developer Conference (GDC) in San Francisco, Intel emphasized the importance of new desktop form factors to improving sales.
According to Intel, in terms of desktop sales, emerging form factors and enthusiast/high-end desktops are the two current areas of focus. Intel's Desktop Client Platform Group VP Lisa Graff told developers at the GDC that Intel will continue to ramp up its offering of chips with high end integrated/on-die GPUs, with the rollout of the next generation of Iris.
Introduced with the launch of the fourth-generation Core-Series processors in 2013 -- chips which pack 22 nm Haswell cores -- Iris is by far Intel's most serious graphics effort to date, as Intel's decision to give it special branding (a first) indicates.
Ms. Graff comments:
The desktop business is a large and important segment for Intel, and we are investing in it – reinventing form factors, experiences and products for our customers. Enthusiasts are the heart and soul of the desktop and they asked us to give them more. We are delivering – more cores, better overclocking, faster speeds.
On the enthusiast front Intel's first upcoming release will be "Devil's Canyon", the mid-generation refresh of Haswell, which will bring high-end chips with unlocked multipliers. Intel says to expect an "improved thermal interface and CPU packaging materials that are expected to enable significant enhancements to performance and overclocking capabilities."
Next up is an octacore "Extreme Edition" version of Haswell, due out in H2 2014 (likely Q3 2014). The beastly processor will feature 16 threads and support for the new DDR4 memory standard.
Intel also said to expect a Pentium "Anniversary Edition" processor (Intel recently celebrated the twentieth birthday of the Pentium brand). Similar to the Devil's Canyon chips, this will feature an unlocked multiplier with independent memory and CPU frequencies. Intel did not indicate any special thermal features, though, so there's reason to believe this may be a sooner release -- possibly out in Q2 2014.
Intel also said to expect unlocked chips for enthusiasts sporting Broadwell cores -- the 14 nm die shrink of Haswell. While no timetable was given, it's safe to say that should happen sometime in very late 2014 or sometime in 2015.
The chipmaker didn't state much about the status of Broadwell otherwise, but there's no reason to believe that it's broken from its plan to launch the chip to consumers in Q4 2014. According to Intel's Q4 2013 earnings call, that chip is expected to enter mass production by the end of this month (the end of Q1 2014).
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