14 DAY TRIAL // Although most of us know what Intel's future CPU plans are, things become rather tricky after Ivy Bridge as the information available on the Web is rather scarce at this time, but this isn't the case anymore as a report about Ivy Bridge's successors has managed to make things somewhat clearer.
Right now, Sandy Bridge is the company's latest CPU architecture and, as most of you already know, this will spawn two different chips, the Sandy Bridge E high-performance processors and the Ivy Bridge CPUs.
While the former was designed in order to take the place of the venerable Nehalem Arch, the latter is a 22nm die shrink of Sandy Bridge that brings only a few minor improvements from an architectural point of view.
However, one of the most important features of Ivy Bridge, as Semi Accurate reports, lies in the introduction of the die stacking technology, which would allow Intel to save die space without having to give up on features.
This is particularly important since the next generation CPU that Intel plans to release in 2013, code-named Haswell, starts getting serious about die stacking, interposers, and related advanced packaging technologies.
Not so many details abut the chip are available at this time, but Haswell will use a new architecture that should bring better IPC performance and a more powerful integrated graphics core.
The same architecture would then be used for the Broadwell chips which is a 16nm die shrink of Haswell.
From this point on, things are rather sketchy, as there are about three years to go until Sky Lake will be released, so the chip is still under heavy development and Intel is just working on the first silicon simulations right now.
The architecture will pack an integrated graphics core but no one knows if this will be based on the Larrabee 2 or the GenX GPU designs.
Finally, Sky Lake's successor is called Skymont and will most probably be built on an 11nm fabrication process.