A while ago we mentioned that Broadwell won’t show up in the desktop space this year and we got it right. All of a sudden Broadwell, the 14nm ‘tock’ shrink of Intel’s Haswell architecture, disappeared from the company’s 2014 roadmaps, indicating that there might be a delay in transition to 14nm.

We expected to see 14nm Broadwell based notebooks and detachables before the back-to-school period (August) and this is not happening. Desktop Broadwell 14nm parts won't make it this year at all.

A month ago Intel launched Haswell refresh known as the Core i7 4790K and this processor is supposed to last until Q2 2015 when Intel plans to release desktop Broadwell and Skylake processors. Broadwell is a refresh of Haswell, while Skylake S is a brand new architecture that should bring the successor to Core i7 4790K. 

Consumers will like the fact that desktop Broadwell brings VP8 hardware support to Intel Quick Sync Video. Back at IDF 2013 Brian Krzanich said that Broadwell can have 30 percent improvement in power compared to Haswell, which means that Intel should be able to achieve higher clock and better performance at the same thermal envelope or around 85W for high-end desktop designs.

Intel's CEO Brian Krzanich already said on the record that we can expect to see Broadwell (Core M) based computers before the holiday season, but not in time for back-to-school. This implies that the chips are coming to notebooks, detachables and maybe the occasional All-in-One desktop.

The real 14nm desktop revolution comes in the latter half of 2015. With this timeframe in mind one can easily conclude that Broadwell is coming later than it was supposed to and that the follow-up part codenamed Skylake might actually come on time, in late Q2 2015. Our industry sources already implied that desktop parts might start showing up every other year, which is definitely a bad news for Intel processor fans, the DIY market but it is very good news for AMD’s desktop division.