Nearly six years have passed since the Core i7 series debuted as a 45nm part on the LGA1366 platform. Codenamed Bloomfield, Intel's Nehalem-based quad-core lineup included the celebrated Core i7-920 and has since been refined over many iterations through Intel's tick-tock philosophy, which follows every architectural update with a die shrink.

Today's release isn't a tick or a tock, it's simply a refresh -- like what we saw with Sandy Bridge in 2011 when Intel released the Core i7-2600K in January, then refreshed it with the 2700K in October. Those new CPUs offered a measly 100MHz speed bump and based on what we've seen, we don't expect much more from the updated Haswell parts.