Intel Roadmap Hints Broadwell-E Has Been Axed As Cannonlake Development Accelerates

An Intel PC Client Platform CPU Roadmap has surfaced, indicating the central processing unit manufacturer could be abandoning Broadwell-E entirely in favour of Skylake-E, as well as hinting at its next-generation 10nm Cannonlake processors surfacing around this time next year.

The persistent delays for Intel’s Broadwell range has seen its potential time on the market contract, as Skylake speeds in. In fact, the time between Haswell and Skylake is so slim, the roadmap suggests Intel is skipping its Broadwell-E range of extreme processors entirely. By the time Broadwell-E is ready to roll out Skylake will already be established, offering advanced microarchitecture capable of more efficient performance with lower energy draw.

Broadwell-E3 was pencilled in for a Q1 2016 launch, but the current Haswell-E refresh will be the flagship extreme performance chips on the market until Skylake-E is ready in Q3 2016. Ultimately Broadwell is being shown up more and more as a flash in the pan microarchitecture, a stop-gap until Skylake arrives. Rest assured though standard Skylake CPUs will be with us soon enough; the 14nm processing technology will be arriving in desktop chips come Q3/Q4 of this year.

The roadmap also reveals Intel’s intention to launch its 10nm Cannonlake processors in mid-2016. If true then development on Cannonlake is actually being sped up. Previous info suggested Intel was ready to make the leap to the 10nm process in 2017, but must be ramping up yields early. Unfortunately Cannonlake won’t be targeting desktop initially, the first processors to hit in 2016 will be for laptops and netbooks, with desktop CPUs arriving later in the year.

If you're in need of a CPU upgrade it's getting trickier and trickier to decide what to wait for. Intel has both Skylake and Cannon Lake just around the corner, and AMD has been banging the Zen drum pretty loudly as of late. Which will you be picking up?