Intel Swears Again That Its Game-Changing Super Tiny Chips Will Be Here Soon

Broadwell is a huge deal for Intel. Based on last year's "Haswell," the design uses a new process that brings the size their chips' transistors from 22 nm to 14 nm - boosting processor speed while cutting heat and power usage by as much as 30%.

Cutting the process down to 14 nm - that's billionths of a meter - requires some serious R&D work from Intel. We're talking about a scale where things are so small that quantum mechanics start making things act in ways that you don't expect.

It's not hard to see why Intel has to invest billions into its research on the technologies used to work at this scale.

Back in October, Intel CEO Brian Krzanich announced on the company's earnings call that the chips had been set back approximately three months.

On its earnings call Thursday, Krzanich again told investors that the chips are on their way. In his opening statement, he noted that the company finally got yields of the chip (the percentage of chips made that are sufficiently functional) to the point where it can begin production in the first quarter of 2014.

Don't expect the chips to show up in computers this spring, however. In response to a question from a Wall Street analyst, Krzanich also noted that the chip would begin to show up in "all-in-ones, 2-in-1s, convertibles and detachables" in the second half of the year.