Six months ago we published a news about Broadwell-EX/EP CPUs and their uncertain future. Some weeks later, Intel confirmed that Broadwell-EX/EP will be released. Was our source a liar? No, he isn't.
Yusuke Ohara, a japanese journalist, in this article talks about the advantges of Broadwell over Skylake and, more specifically, about the 14nm FinFET node and the uarch of Skylake.
Ohara supposes that Intel has increased the number of pipelines stage in Skylake, in order to cover the problems of the 14nm FinFET when the chips have to work at high frequencies. This explain because i5/i7 Broadwell CPUs has lower frequencies than i5/i7 Haswell CPUs, despite it is just a revision of Haswell (Tick-Tock strategy). Also, Broadwell power consumption is far better than Haswel power consumptionl if the CPUs operate at 2,5 GHz or lower, meanwhile is whorse at high frequencies (>2,5 GHz).
According to these data, Intel has chosen to sell Broadwell-EX/EP CPUs for two reasons:
- Broadwell-EX/EP CPUs power consumption will be lower that Haswell-EX/EP CPUs when these CPUs operate at 2,5 GHz or lower frequencies;
- Broadwell-EX/EP CPUs will have a lot of cores (up to 24C/48T) and new SIMD (TSX).