Haswell began shipping to manufacturers and OEMs in mid-2013, with its desktop chips officially launched in September 2013.

The Haswell architecture is specifically designed[7] to optimize the power savings and performance benefits from the move to FinFET (non-planar, "3D") transistors on the improved 22 nm process node.

[77] Haswell Refresh CPUs are supported by Intel's 9 Series chipsets (Z97 and H97, codenamed Wildcat Point), while motherboards with 8 Series chipsets (codenamed Lynx Point) usually require a BIOS update to support Haswell Refresh CPUs.

[79] Other changes for the Devil's Canyon CPUs include a TDP increase to 88 W, additional decoupling capacitors to help smooth out the outputs from the fully integrated voltage regulator (FIVR), and support for the VT-d that was previously limited to non-K-series SKUs.

People have modified the graphics driver for these versions to adapt to normal Windows XP to varying degrees of success.