14 DAY TRIAL // The rumored April 29 release of Intel’s next-gen 22nm Ivy Bridge processors was apparently confirmed by a recently leaked company slide which also mentions that a second batch of third generation Core chips will arrive on June 3, 2012.
The initial release will cover the third-generation Core i5 and Core i7 desktop products with prices ranging from $184 to $332 (141 to 254 EUR), and Core i7 mobile chips.
On June 3, Intel will out a new series of Ivy Bridge CPUs that have lower power requirements, as well as the Q77 and Q75 motherboard chipsets.
According to the same slide leaked by Donanim Haber, the last batch of next-gen 22nm processors is scheduled for the summer of 2012, when Intel will introduce a series of new SKUs in the entry-level Core i3 and Pentium product lines.
As far as chipsets are concerned, on April 29, Intel will unveil the Z77, H77, Z75 and B75 platform controller hubs for desktop systems and the HM77, UM77, HM76 and HM75 notebooks chipsets.
Ivy Bridge is the code name used for the 22nm die shrink of the current Sandy Bridge chips, and features basically the same architecture but with a few minor tweaks and improvements.
This includes a new on-die GPU that will come with full DirectX 11 support, as well as with 30% more EUs than Sandy Bridge, in order to offer up to 60% faster performance than current Core CPUs according to Intel.
In addition, the processor cores have also received some minor tweaks as their AVX performance was slightly increased and Intel has updated the integrated PCI Express controller to the 3.0 standard.
More details regarding the specifications of Intel’s Ivy Bridge CPUs are available in this article, while a preview of the HD 4000 graphics core, included in the Core i7-3770K, is available here.
