Print
Stop whatever it is you're doing and run through your office or down the street yelling, 'Ivy Bridge is here! Ivy Bridge is here!' Sure, you'll elicit funny stares as you lap the water cooler and blow by accounting's set of cubicles, but those 'in the know' will understand what all the fuss is about. They'll also be appreciative of the heads up that, finally, Intel's Ivy Bridge launch is official.
According to several online reports, Intel officially rolled out the 3D Transistor carpet today with a line of Ivy Bridge processors that total a baker's dozen. All 13 chips are flavored quad-core with a mix of Core i5 and i7 toppings, most of which are aimed at desktops. Intel will serve the lower end (and less expensive) dual-core i3 and i5 models in the Spring.
"This is the world's first 22nm product and we'll be delivering about 20 percent more processor performance using 20 percent less average power," Intel's Kirk Skaugen told BBC.
Skaugen says there are three factories kicking out Ivy Bridge processors and a fourth will go online sometime later this year. According to Skaugen, this is "Intel's fastest ramp ever." Demand could still end up outstripping supply, but to keep this from being an extended paper launch, Intel's Ivy Bridge production is 50 percent higher than it was for Sandy Bridge early on.
In addition to more processing performance and less power consumption, Ivy Bridge brings on-chip SuperSpeed USB 3.0 to the table. It also sports improved graphics and, for the first time, OpenCL 1.1 and DirectX 11.
Comments are closed on this article
Dude420
April 23, 2012 at 11:22pm
can't see a viable real-world reason for upgrading
i have an 'aging' i7-920 @ 4.2ghz (Scythe mugen-II w/14cm-fan)
running in an ASUS p6t-se, 12gb ram with ati-4890 1gb gddr5using a single 1680x1050 monitor i never felt i needed more pwer for gaming or any task an average user would typically require. heck, i even dialed it back to a power-saving 1.2 ghz and saw no detectable performance hit ..until, that is, rendering maya/mentalray images..
then every cycle mattered and enabling HT gave consistent %30-40 more.. this is the area where buffer cpus tempt me m,ost. well... its always a good idea to focus on more clever and efficient geometry and shading
true, i'm losing out on, opencl1.1, dx11 effects and i don't run 3d entertainment modes.. the main benefits i could think of is
1- usb3-to be (*more) able to transfer large chunks of data or entire volumes, but even w/o native support, i can achieve good results with a 3rd party add-in card for my x58, having better pci-x's might potentially make loading game levels (or apps if your into that)happen faster if your rocking ssds (at the moment not me)
i never waited 'toooo long' for anything to load and i do a bit planning for the big overnight hauls and i seem to be surviving!2-save electricity... i'm all for it, but unless i have 100s or 1000s of machines...then it doesn't constitute a major 'must-have' for now
3-bragging rights- while fun to do i admit, ,, sometimes 'technically' correct too but usually unnessasery overkill (to wallet in particular) and no practical advantage in the real world apart from a shot-lived boost in esteem (an imminent -re-crash when said gear soon categorized as 'ancient' or 'relic', like my 'cutting edge A500 w 3mb-"fast"RAM)
4- tasks that actually utilize the horsepower. most folks should be ok with lo-clocked core-2's,,, apart from MPC'er types or similar, very few even harness a i5 properly.
there is always the idiot that will gag even a super beef cpu with slops and slops of spaghetti cross-nstallations of bloatware running at start up, multiple instances of conflicting drivers for the same part,a obsolete piece of bottle-necking hardware fro a different age they insisted to fit-in, several antiviruses at the same time (some actual viruses masqurading as av's..)100's of threads in the task manager and a 99.9 C-drive occupance while D is blank.. etc.. and then then wondering if its time 'to upgrade' cuz the machine doesn't seem to be cuttin it anymore... is this why stronger/improved cpus are needed? sold?
i'm still using a 487 P4, 2gbRAM, ATI-X1950, creative x-xfi box for internet, HD movies and Quake3 and its fantastic, just refreshed the thermal paste and its smooth
zNelson24
April 23, 2012 at 4:29pm
I'm waiting for the mobile Ivy Bridge processors to come out. I'm getting my hands on a revised Alienware m14x, and I'm hoping these new processors will be more energy efficient.
I'm fine with my Sandy Bridge desktop though. I don't see myself overhauling my machine until Intel comes out with whatever supersedes Sandy Bridge-E.
pastorbob
April 23, 2012 at 3:00pm
I'm in no big hurry to upgrade since I just built two i5-2500K systems with SSD's, midrange discrete graphics and 16 gig of RAM on Z68 motherboards. I waited a year to jump on Sandy Bridge. I'll wait at least that long for Ivy Bridge. I've found that the wait lets all of the "gotcha"'s get worked out (remember the Sandy Bridge SATA port snafu) and by the time I upgrade my builds go very smoothly. Keeps my already grey hair from going white.
JohnP
April 23, 2012 at 8:21pm
2nd post here about this. It was the P67 CHIPSET and not the SB CPU that had the SATA port problem. I swapped out my ASUS P8P67 EVO for free, NOT my i7-2600K. Nothing to do with SB.
And you are right about not bothering to upgrade. Your present builds are fine even after the IB launch.
pastorbob
April 24, 2012 at 4:48am
The P67 is a Sandy Bridge chipset is it not?
I refer you to the article in Max PC dated 1/31/2011 and entitled "Updated: 17 burning questions on Intel's Sandy Bridge chipset fiasco"
Nowhere in my post did I say it was a CPU problem. Thus my comments about the Sandy Bridge SATA port issue and waiting for the problems to be worked out b4 upgrading are valid.
Perhaps you should read the posts a little closer b4 you attempt to correct someone.
Hilarity
April 23, 2012 at 2:28pm
HD 4000 onboard still can't match the (aging) 3870K's 6550D. And this is the first generation, Trinity will widen the gap further. Suck on that Intel.
JohnP
April 23, 2012 at 2:18pm
Aha, found it. The SALES OF IVY BRIDGE WILL START NEXT WEEK ON THE 30TH OF APRIL!
So don't bother doing what I have been doing and checking Newegg every two hours, heh.
JohnP
April 23, 2012 at 2:30pm
Reviews are ALL OVER the web. They include the high end SB-E CPUs in the benchmarks along with AMD Bulldozer and other AMD and Intel variants. For all intents and purposes, the high-end SB-E buys you very little, winning only a few benchmarks for high end programs like Photoshop and transcoding that need a lot of cores. Bulldozer is decidedly middle of the pack except (again) for a few multicore programs and some graphics benchmarks.
The upshot is that the high end IV and SB are the best choices, pretty much equal, with the edge going to IB (about 3-7% better benchmarks). IB is more power efficient while SB is a slightly better over clocking solution.
Forget about the built in GPU in pretty much ANY chip if you are a desktop gamer. Stick with discrete graphics cards. (HOWEVER, there is an interesting part of the ASUS Z77 boards and possibly other manufacturers called LucidLogix Virtu MVP giving a graphics boost using a combo of the two.)
So IB unless you already have a SB, no good reason to upgrade. That is why I am going to upgrade anyways, heh. Well, I have a good home for my SB and I can brag about it is all.
As for lower end/lower cost variants, you need to wait until the reviews come in, no good way to tell what will be the new sweet spot like the i7-2500K was (but one site really likes the i5-3570K at $212).
Sorry Lloyd, you are just too slow...
JohnP
April 23, 2012 at 2:19pm
I am doing a internet sweep using Google shopping and triggering on i7-3770K every couple of hours. One one hit so far for a preorder and WOT has a red circle on it, heh.
I will post if anything shows up...
Found it. Not on sale until the end of the month, literally.
Dorito Bandit
April 23, 2012 at 7:38am
Will there be any 6-core or 8-core Ivy Bridge CPUs coming out later? I edit video and photos and need a beast of a CPU to speed up my work.
Thanks
Peanut Fox
April 23, 2012 at 11:08am
There should be some Ivy Bridge E processors on a new chipset later this year, or early next year.
Hamburger
April 23, 2012 at 6:51am
So how does a desktop Ivy bridge i7 compare to the Sandy bridge-E i7.. like the 3960?
irishsj
April 23, 2012 at 7:47am
Tough to compare a quad core to a 6 core. The 3820 SB-E compared to the 3770K would be a fair comparison.
praetor_alpha
April 23, 2012 at 6:40am
Maybe this time, the chipsets won't be bad.
Yes, I got burned on Sandy Bridge.
andrewc513
April 23, 2012 at 11:21am
As did some people when P55 launched. It was buggy, premature BIOS's back then. My motherboard's original v1.0 (Gigabyte P55M-UD2) got scrapped quickly after launch and they released a v1.1 to replace it, and they continued on updating the BIOS. Luckily they advance RMA'd a new board to me, so no big deal.
That said, Ivy Bridge should be no problem. Z68 and Z77 should be rather similar, and many P67/Z68 boards are releasing BIOS updates that allow support for Ivy Bridge chips(minus Z77-specific features, that is).
JohnP
April 23, 2012 at 10:44am
Err, The P67 CHIPSET was bad, NOT any of the the CPUs. that had nothing to do with SB, just bad luck to have purchased the P67 mobo (as did I- I got a new mobo out of the deal, I never had the issue that the chipset was recalled for, so who cares?)
Zoandar
April 23, 2012 at 6:25am
"most of which are aimed at desktops" - I guess Intel never got the "post-PC era" memo. :-)
digitaldoc77
April 23, 2012 at 8:41am
So glad that Intel did not get that memo. I have plenty of laptops, but when I need to do some real computing, my desktop definitely does the heavy lifting around the house. I seriously hope the future is not all ARM.
SenTora
April 23, 2012 at 9:51am
They probably did get the memo, but tore it up and laughed at it and kept it moving.
