More solid information on Ivy Bridge's launch dates

Subject: General Tech | March 15, 2012 - 01:05 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: Ivy Bridge, Intel, haswell, lynx point

This morning DigiTimes suggests a more concrete launch schedule for Ivy Bridge, which slates the processor to begin hitting the streets by the end of next month.  The initial launch in April should see all of the announced Core i7 models become available as well as the middle member of the Core i5 line.  By June we should see more of the Core i5 models become available but those looking for a low cost Core i3 will be waiting until the end of summer before they can purchase a new processor.  It will be this time next year before Haswell and Lynx Point become available if you are planning to hold off on upgrading until that generation of processor becomes available.

"Intel is set to announce its next-generation 22nm-based Ivy Bridge processors by the end of April with 11 models including Core i7-3770K, Core i7-3770, Core i7-3770S, Core i7-3770T and Core i5-3550, expected to appear in the initial launch, while several models including Core i5-3470, Core i5-3470S, Core i5-3475S, Core i5-3570 and Core i5-3570S will be released in early June, according to sources from upstream component players.

As for Ivy Bridge-based entry-level Core i3 and Pentium series processors, Intel is expected to release the CPUs in August with 7 series chipsets to appear in early April."

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Intel Haswell Processors To Launch In First Half of 2013

Subject: Processors | February 12, 2012 - 06:57 PM | Tim Verry
Tagged: shark bay, Intel, haswell, cpu

Intel's Ivy Bridge processor, the upcoming "tick" in Intel's clock-esque world domination strategy, has yet to be released and we are already getting rumors and leaked information coming in about the "tock" that will be Ivy Bridge's successor in the 22nm Haswell processors (as part of the Shark Bay platform). Ivy Bridge processors will bring incremental performance improvements and lower power usage on the same 1155 socket that Sandy Bridge employs.

Haswell; however, will move to (yet another) socket LGA 1150 on the desktop, and will bring incremental improvements over Ivy Bridge. Improvements include much faster integrated processor graphics and the AVX2 instruction set. Unfortunately, Intel will be returning to an increased TDP (thermal design power) with Haswell compared to the lower TDP from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge.

According to Domain Haber, who claims to have gotten their hands on a leaked road map, Intel will be launching Ivy Bridge through the end of this year, and then will debut their Haswell processors in the first half of 2013. The alleged road map can be seen below.

What I found interesting about the road map is that there is no mention of an Ivy Bridge-E or Haswell-E processor. Instead, the current Sandy Bridge-E chips are shown occupying the high end and enthusiast segment through at least the first half of 2013 and the launch of Haswell. Whether enthusiasts will continue to choose the Sandy Bridge-E processors for that long will remain to be seen, however. Also strange is that, according to VR-Zone, Intel will have three tiers of integrated graphics performance with GT1, GT2, and GT3. They will then place the fastest graphics core in the mobile chips and leave the slower graphics cores in the desktop chips. Discrete cards are not dead yet, it seems (unless you're rocking an AMD APU of course).

Have you invested in a Sandy Bridge-E setup, or are you still holding onto an older chip to wait for the best performance upgrade for your money?  If you have bought into SB-E, do you think it'll last you into 2013?

Overclocking the next generation of Intel CPUs

Subject: General Tech | October 14, 2011 - 11:24 AM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: sandy bridge-e, overclocking, lynx point, Ivy Bridge, Intel, haswell

 Perhaps not everybody has fond memories of overclocking past architectures with jumpers on motherboards and needing to be able to do math to determine what overclock you want and more importantly if it took or if the system bailed back to default clocks.  Those days are behind us now, as the BIOS becomes the UEFI and you can use a mouse to affect changes on your system timings.  Bulldozer does offer some complexity to those looking for a challenge but for most it is the unlocked Sandy Bridge processors that are the go to chip for overclockers.  According to information VR-Zone picked up at IDF, overclocking the upcoming families of processors will be even easier.  Intel has changed quite a bit over recent years, from the extreme of locking all their processor frequencies to making it easy for the enthusiast to push their CPU beyond design specs.

"Ivy Bridge CPUs decouple the main clock finally, following what the coming Sandy Bridge - E Socket 2011 is also implementing. Now, you can overclock the cores and memory without worrying about affecting the I/O and PCIe clocks. But then comes the more interesting piece news. A year later, in early 2013, the pinnacle of Intel's 22 nm process show off, the initial Haswell processor, is expected to go another step further, where CPU core, GPU, memory, PCI and DMI ratios are all set independently here, on top of fine grain BCLK base clock available within the Lynx Point chipset."

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IDF 2011: Intel Haswell Architecture Offers 20x Lower Standby Power

Subject: General Tech, Processors | September 13, 2011 - 01:05 PM | Ryan Shrout
Tagged: tri-gate, sandy bridge, Ivy Bridge, idf 2011, idf, haswell

The first keynote of the Intel Developer Forum is complete and it started with Paul Otellini discussing the high level direction for Intel in the future.  One of the more interesting points made was not about Ivy Bridge, which we will all see very soon, but about Haswell, Intel's next microarchitecture meant to replace the Sandy Bridge designs sometime in late 2012 or early 2013.  Expected to focus on having 8 processing cores, much improved graphics and the new AVX2 extenstion set, Haswell will also be built on the 3D tri-gate transistors announced over the summer.

Otellini describes Haswell's performance in two important metrics.  First, it will use 30% less power than Sandy Bridge at the same performance levels.  This is a significant step and could be the result of higher IPC as well as better efficiency thanks to the 22nm process technology.  

Where Haswell really excels is apparently in the standby metric: as a platform it could use as much as 20x less power than current hardware.  Obviously Intel's engineers have put a focus on power consumption more than performance and the results are beginning to show.  The goals are simple but seemingly impossible to realize: REAL all-day power and more than 10 days of stand by time.

IDF is coming soon

Subject: General Tech | August 2, 2011 - 03:07 PM | Jeremy Hellstrom
Tagged: idf, intel developers forum, Ivy Bridge, haswell

At last years Intel Developers Forum, the star of the show was Sandy Bridge as we had not yet seen the chip in action.  That seems longer than a year ago, but it was only last September which means that we are drawing close to the 2011 IDF.  According to DigiTimes this year they will be focusing on mobility products, as we know Intel is working on a new(ish) form factor which they are calling Ultrabook which will replace the CULV form factor that we have known previously.  There were not that many ultrabook branded Sandy Bridge products released this year and with the upcoming release of Ivy Bridge it seems that there won't be many in the future, as Ivy Bridge is intended to do everything Sandy could and use less power doing it.  The other focus that DigiTimes expects to see, as do we at PC Perspective, is more information on Haswell which will be the next generation of Intel chip architecture.  We don't expect to see working silicon until 2013, but you can expect a lot more information about the instruction sets it will use, which is only to be expected at a developers conference.

"CPU maker Intel is set to host its Intel Developer Forum (IDF) show in San Francisco from September 13-15 and its plans for ultrabook, upcoming Ivy Bridge- and Haswell-based processors as well, as its strategy for next-generation tablet PC processor, are all expected to become focuses at the show, according to sources from PC players.

Intel, was originally set to enter the Ivy Bridge-based CPU generation in the fourth quarter of 2011, but after considering the yield rate of the 22nm process and the market status worldwide, the company, in the end, decided to postpone the launch of the new-generation CPU to March of 2012, allowing a smooth transition between the two generation of CPU structures.

In addition to the Ivy Bridge structure, Intel is also set to reveal the detail specifications of its Haswell processor, which will appear in 2013, at IDF in September, the sources noted.

As for ultrabook, Intel will display several completed models from the first-tier notebook players including Asustek Computer, Hewlett-Packard (HP) and Lenovo, at the show with Intel is also expected to provide the detail of its ultrabook design concept as well as its three stages of execution plan for the device.

For tablet PCs, Intel has been cooperating with Google to pair up its Atom Z670 processor with Android 3.0, while will showcase its latest progress in MeeGo and AppUP Center at the show."

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Intel announces Haswell's new instruction set for 2013

Subject: General Tech, Processors | June 14, 2011 - 02:47 AM | Scott Michaud
Tagged: Intel, haswell

Intel’s new processor lines come in two flavors: process shrinks and new architectures. Each revision comes out approximately a year after the prior one alternative between new architectures (tock) and process shrinks (tick). Sandy Bridge was the most recent new architecture which will be followed by Ivy Bridge, a process shrink of Sandy Bridge, and that will be succeeded by Intel’s newest architecture: Haswell.

I can Haswell?

The instructions added by Intel for their upcoming Haswell architecture are useful for a whole range of applications from image and video processing; to face detection; to database manipulation; to the generation of hashes; as well as arithmetic in general. As you can see the addition of instructions in this revision is quite wide in its scope. Keep in mind that the introduction of a new instruction set does not mean that programs will be optimized to take advantage of the added benefits for some time. However, when programs do start optimizing for the newer architectures it looks as though Haswell’s new offerings will speed up otherwise complicated tasks into a single instruction.

What task would you like to see a speedup on? Comment below.