After a minor delay, Intel’s next generation of Core series processors, codenamed “Haswell,” will arrive in early June, according to a humorous announcement from the company on Friday. Assuming that the countdown begins at the time of Intel’s post, Haswell should launch Monday, June 3, at 11:00 pm EDT (Tuesday, June 4 at 11:00 am CST), which just happens to coincide with the start of the important computer trade show Computex, held annually in Taipei, Taiwan.
The public launch of Haswell at the start of Computex will give computer and device makers the opportunity to announce their own Haswell-based products during the show. Haswell’s biggest improvements benefit mobile computing the most, meaning that consumers should expect a deluge of new notebooks, hybrids, and tablets to be announced the first week of June.
Early looks at Haswell predict that the chip will offer 10 to 15 percent improvements in processing power over the current Ivy Bridge architecture and up to double the graphics performance of the HD 4000 with battery life improvements in both notebook and ultrabook configurations.
Those following Intel’s CPU development will recognize Haswell as a “Tock” in Intel’s “Tick-Tock” strategy. Starting in 2007, Intel adopted the “Tick-Tock” model: an existing architecture is shrunk to a smaller die size with a “tick” and then a new architecture is introduced with a “tock.” As a “tock,” Haswell is a new architecture built at Ivy Bridge’s 22nm and will be shrunk to 14nm in the next “tick,” codenamed Broadwell and due in 2014.
Intel will be providing updates on the launch as the date nears.
