Intel Ivy Bridge Dual-Core CPUs to Arrive in Early May, Says Report

After bringing to market its first Ivy Bridge processors at the beginning of April, Intel will continue to expand its CPU lineup with new chips based on this architecture, and they are expected to arrive in early May.

Previously, all we knew about the launch of the second batch of Ivy Bridge processors was that Intel planned for them to arrive in Q2 of 2012, but Fudzilla has now uncovered that their release is actually scheduled for the week of May 6 (May 6-12).

This launch will include the Core i7-3520M and Core i5-3360M, as well as the ultra-low voltage (ULV) based Core i7-3667U and Core i5-3427U, the former featuring a TDP of 35W, while the latter are 17W parts.

In addition to these dual-core mobile chips, Intel will also reportedly unveil the QS77 and QM77 mobile chipsets at about the same time.

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 updated the integrated PCI Express controller to the 3.0 standard.

In the mobile version of Ivy Bridge, all these improvements are paired with a configurable TDP design, which enables the CPU to greatly surpass its maximum thermal design power when additional cooling is provided (like when placed on a notebook cooling stand).