Things are not looking well for people who want affordable powerful CPUs for desktop PC. Intel's latest microarchitecture – "Haswell" has only brought minor performance improvements and was aimed mostly at power efficiency. While 6 and 8 core Intel CPUs can provide more performance the price premium is extremely steep.  AMD's "Piledriver" based CPUs are currently their top desktop offering and are priced competitively. Their main disadvantage is the 32 nm manufacturing process, which makes them more power hungry than Intel CPUs. The transition to 28 nm and Steamroller microarchitecture should bring some improvements, but latest AMD roadmaps show no new high end CPUs for 2014. The lower powered Kaveri parts based on 28 nm process with "Steamroller" CPU cores and GCN GPU cores is planned for January 14th launch early next year. It will feature full support for AMD's HSA allowing iGPU and CPU to fully share memory, TrueAudio and Mantle. The lack of plans for a high performance part is disappoint, as Intel is unlikely to drop their prices without a strong competitor.