Intel's Ivy Bridge line of processors has been discussed by the company for quite some time, but now some details about the processors and their release dates has been discovered. Leaked documents show a slew of parts and include benchmarks, specifications, and even a release window for the new chips.
The documents detailing the Ivy Bridge chips were obtained by X-bit Labs and show the chips will begin releasing in Q2 of 2012. A total of 18 parts are listed in the documents with eight of those being standard desktop processors. The remaining 10 are categorized as ultra-low voltage. All of the processors on the list are based on Intel's 22nm technology.
The whole goal of the Ivy Bridge line of processors was to reduce power consumption and beef up graphics processing. It seems that Intel was able to accomplish those goals. The Ivy Bridge processors provide an average power savings of around 19% when compared to equivalent Sandy Bridge units.
Some slides were found from Tom's Hardware demonstrating performance for these processors and comparing them to current Core i7 Sandy Bridge chips. Tom's Hardware indicated an across the board performance boast for the new processors vs. their Sandy Bridge equivalents. Intel claims this is due to better architecture in the 22nm processors.
The Tom's Hardware slides also indicate a significant improvement in integrated graphics with the new HD Graphics 4000. The 4000 features an enhanced AVX acceleration, support for DX11 & OpenCL 1.1, along with PCI-Express Gen 3.0. That integrated graphics bump seems to have had huge effects on the speed/performance of particular tasks like:
- 56% faster performance in ArcSoft Media Expresso
- 192% higher overall 3DMark Vantage Performance Preset - Score
- 17% faster performance in 3DMark Vantage Performance Preset - CPU benchmark
- 199% faster performance in 3DMark Vantage Performance Preset - GPU benchmark
It's worth keeping in mind that the actual chips aren't out in the wild yet so none of these performance numbers can be validated, but they are impressive nonetheless. I'm personally curious to see how these chips impact battery life on the laptops and Ultrabooks releasing in 2012.
