Intel's strongest central processing units, at present, are the members of the Sandy Bridge-E collection, and it looks like there won't be any replacements for them in the near future. There has been a lot of talk about the Ivy Bridge CPU line and how it is going to be released later than planned, for whatever reason.
We've even seen
ultrabooks and
gaming laptops based on chips from this series.
What we haven't stumbled upon overmuch is information regarding the higher-end Ivy Bridge-E line of processors.
This situation has been rectified, but the revelation may not be what enthusiasts were looking forward to.
Apparently, it will take quite some time for the first superpowered Ivy Bridge-E CPUs to make their appearance in official capacity.
Optimists used to believe that the parts would be available this very year (2012), but the roadmap slide from
ComputerBase begs to differ.
The Ivy Bridge-E isn't even included on that roadmap, and the time line reaches as late as the first half of 2013.
As such, that a release won't take place before July 2013 is fairly certain.
The mightiest Ivy Bridge-E chip will be called Core i7-3980X and will replace the Sandy Bridge Core i7-3960X. That means that it could have higher clock frequencies or the seventh and eighth cores enabled, along with the remaining 5 MB of L3 cache.
This turn of events is blamed on the delay of the main Ivy Bridge collection, which caused a massive shift in the company's strategy for 2013.
For those who aren't aware, the item releases are spread across several months. We examined the plans as thoroughly as we could
a while ago, even including the motherboard chipsets.
Nevertheless, there is a silver lining in all this: people who bought an LGA2011 Sandy Bridge-E unit won't have any reason to consider it outdated any time soon.
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