New CPUs and chipsets from Intel normally go hand-in-hand, but earlier this month when the company announced its 9-series chipsets , all we got was a slightly faster clock speed bump to Haswell . News of truly new CPUs based on the upcoming "Broadwell" architecture was nowhere to be found, and we've generally heard very little about Broadwell aside from an announcement of a delay into the second half of 2014.

There are many months in the second half of 2014, but Intel CEO Brian Krzanich got a little more specific in a statement to Reuters today. "I can guarantee for holiday, and not at the last second of holiday," said Krzanich. "Back to school—that's a tight one. Back to school you have to really have it on-shelf in July, August. That's going to be tough."

This means we'll most likely see Broadwell chips (and, more importantly, new devices from OEMs that can use Broadwell chips) sometime between September and early December.

Broadwell CPUs will be the first to use Intel's new 14nm manufacturing process, which is responsible at least in part for the delay. In recent years, Intel has used process shrinks to reduce power consumption of its chips while slightly increasing their performance—getting the chips into thin-and-light laptops and tablets has become more important to the company than chasing high-end desktop performance. Intel has said that early Broadwell samples consumed about 30 percent less power than current Haswell chips, and we also expect Intel to continue to focus on the performance of its integrated GPUs.