Intel has announced to crowds at the Game Developers Conference that it plans to 'reinvent the desktop' with an updated processor roadmap that includes a number of high-performance highlights.

Speaking at the event, Intel's Lisa Graff told attendees that her company's updated roadmap concentrates on both power saving - including Ready Mode Technology, which Graff claims will offer the ability for a desktop machine to draw just 10W at idle - and performance, including some products directly targeting the enthusiast market.

Perhaps the most interesting of these features is an improved version of Haswell dubbed Devil's Canyon. Available exclusively in overclocker-friendly K-series parts, the Devil's Canyon includes a tweaked Haswell design - although Intel is not yet making the details of said tweaks available to the public - and what is suggested to be a return to the soldered heatspreader of previous-generation parts. The result, the company claims, should be improved performance and better overclocking results without the need for the warranty-busting delidding many had turned to in light of Haswell's paste-based heatspreader thermal interface material.

Graff also confirmed plans to release 9-series motherboards, which will include support for both Haswell and its next-generation replacement Broadwell. Said Broadwell chips will also include embedded L4 cache and Iris Pro graphics features at the top end, Graff claimed - features which are currently exclusive to the OEM-only ball grid array (BGA) models. These will be joined by an X99 chipset with matching Core i7 Extreme Edition processors, the top end models of which will include eight physical processing cores and support for the new DDR4 memory standard.

Finally, Graff announced an Intel Pentium Anniversary Edition chip, which offers K-series style overclocking on LGA 1150 socket systems. Details of its clockspeeds and pricing were not, however, provided at the event - a common theme of all Graff's announcements.
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