If the thing really hits 300W TDP... assumungthat's pretty much the tdp of the entire system +- some for SSD/HDD... But wouldn't that make water cooling for APUs kind of mandatory?
Maybe, maybe not. I would expect a cooling solution somewhat-similar to those used in high-draw video cards. Few reference cards, even today, rely on any kind of water cooling. and the GPU market has had its fair share of 200-300W monsters.
Also, what is so unrealistic about the APU I described? 14 nm comes from external partner (Samsung/TSMC/GF), HBM also from external partner, GPU cores will already have been developed by AMD for their discrete GFX cards. What's left is the Zen CPU cores. But AMD has already had them in their R&D pipeline for several years, and they are to be completed in 2016.
I'm not sure where this leaves the Bristol Ridge product in AMD's CPU hierarchy. Remember, that's supposed to be an Excavator quad + 512 shader GCN APU that will launch side-by-side with Zen in Q3 2016. If Zen is going straight into APUs in 2016 along side the "non-APU" launch of Zen, then what is the point of Bristol Ridge? Couldn't they do a cut down Zen quad + GCN APU and fit it into that space instead?
That's because Intel doesn't have to publish their plans. They actually execute them.
Oh let's not put on the rosy Intel glasses, now. Broadwell was delayed, and its desktop incarnation was cut back big time. Intel rolled out Haswell refresh as a way to smooth over that little hiccup. There are some pretty well-informed people in here who aren't exactly bullish on Intel's desktop CPU near-future (and no, not just AMD zealots).
I don't have to ask when the next Intel updates are coming. I already know they're coming. All I have to do is sit back and wait.
Gee hope you weren't waiting for Broadwell-K! That was (mostly) cancelled. Broadwell-C looks pretty sweet, but it obviously is not a direct replacement for the 4790k. It's also a whopping two (count em, two) skus for LGA1150.
Well Intel is planning to put their gargantuan Knight's Landing chip into a socket, so they'll need some way of keeping that thing cool... Not sure if they'll bring out a new motherboard standard, or just rely on custom server/workstation boards.
Considering the price on Knight's Landing, it'll probably come on custom boards with custom "sleds". Or at least that's what the demo pics made it look like (whether or not they'll stick with that form for commercial launch is another matter).
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