Intel preps 165W high-performance CPUs

Word out on the street is that that Intel plans to trade TDP for performance. Over the Ivy Bridge and Haswell generations, the chip giant is anticipated to roll out high-end workstation parts with a TDP of 150W and possibly even as high as 180W, reports vr-zone:

So, the sources pointed out to us that, over the Ivy Bridge and Haswell generations, there will be the high end CPU TDP increase across the board to 150W and then 165W - and here we're talking also about generic high end MP servers with 4 sockets or more, including the 'E7 v2 (Ivy Bridge-EX)' and 'E7 v3 (Haswell-EX)' generations. This is a noticeable jump over 135 watts allowed up to now, and could signal even more TDP for the workstation-specific 'W' parts.

For instance, the general expectations - at the same TDP level - is that Intel would provide roughly 40% performance increase when going from Sandy Bridge EP to Ivy Bridge EP Xeon E5 series. The first 25% of that would obviously come by jumping from 8 to 10 cores with the associated cache increase to 25 MB L3. The next 10% on top of that 25% (i.e. extra 12% from the base line) would come from the frequency increase - for instance, the successor to the 2.9 GHz Xeon E5-2690 would be a 3.2 GHz 10-core part in the same 135W TDP bracket. The remaining few % is, of course, minor CPU enhancements and DDR3-1866 server memory support.