Mar 29, 2011 20:01 GMT  ·  By

Although many speculated that Intel's upcoming Ivy Bridge processors would feature an integrated PCI Express Gen 3 controller, up until recently nobody knew for sure this was the case, but a new Intel roadmap that made its way to the Web comes to confirm these rumors and provide us with additional details about these CPUs.

Ivy Bridge will be Intel's first processor built using the 22nm fabrication node and is actually a die shrink of Sandy Bridge with a couple of minor improvements.

One of the most important of these is the addition of a third-generation PCI Express controller that raises the bandwidth available for each PCIe lane from the 500MB/s (4Gb/s) of the 2.x version to 1GB/s (8Gb/s).

According to the slide provided by SemiAccurate, Ivy Bridge's integrated PCI Express controller features 16 PCIe Gen 3.0 lanes, that can be routed to either an x16 slot or to a pair of x8 slots, as well as four additional PCIe Gen 2.0 lanes.

Outside of the new controller, Intel's upcoming chip will also get a new GPU that is now compatible with DirectX 11, features 30% more EUs than its predecessor and can drive up to three displays simultaneously (the Sandy Bridge GPU can only run two displays).

The video encoding, transcoding and decoding capabilities of the graphics core have also been enhanced.

Moving to the new Panther Point PCH that will be launched together with Ivy Bridge, this now features native USB 3.0 support as well as two SATA 6Gbps and four SATA 3Gbps ports , but, sadly, it still uses the same DMI 2.0 link to connect to the CPU.

This could potentially limit the I/O performance of the system when high performance SATA 6Gbps drives are used in tandem with fast USB 3.0 peripherals as the maximum theoretical transfer rate of the DMI 2.0 interface is set at a not-so-impressive 20Gb/s.

Right now, nobody can tell for sure when Ivy Bridge launches, but recent rumors seem to suggest that Intel is thinking about releasing the processors a bit early to counter AMD's upcoming desktop Zambezi chips based on the Bulldozer architecture.

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