Intel Officially Lifts the Veil On Ivy Bridge

New submitter zackmerles writes "Tom's Hardware takes the newly-released, top-of-the-line Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K for a spin. All Core i7 Ivy Bridge CPUs come with Intel HD Graphics 4000, which despite the DirectX 11 support, only provides a modest boost to the Sandy Bridge Intel HD Graphics 3000. However, the new architecture tops the charts for low power consumption, which should make the Ivy Bridge mobile offerings more desirable. In CPU performance, the new Ivy Bridge Core i7 is only marginally better than last generation's Core i7-2700K. Essentially, Ivy Bridge is not the fantastic follow-up to Sandy Bridge that many enthusiasts had hoped for, but an incremental improvement. In the end, those desktop users who decided to skip Sandy Bridge to hold out for Ivy Bridge, probably shouldn't have. On the other hand, since Intel priced the new Core i7-3770K and Core i5-3570K the same as their Sandy Bridge counterparts, there is no reason to purchase the previous generation chips." Reader jjslash points out that coverage is available from all the usual suspects — pick your favorite: AnandTech, TechSpot, Hot Hardware, ExtremeTech, and Overclockers.

Re:HD 4000

[h4rr4r]

The vast majority of users will use it. Intel integrated has been a good enough solution for most users for a long time now.

It would cost more to fab a chip without it, would you pay extra for that? Since they would be making so few.

This is a normal tick in the Intel tick-tock cycle. You will get that 50%-100% with Haswell.

Re:Let me get this straight...

[Calos]

ower efficiency? OK, all missing in action.
Per some of the articles, power consumption is down nearly 20W between the two generations.

So, the big unwritten subtext here is: Intel's 22nm node has got problems. Big problems. Trigate not working out so well?
Far too early to tell. The fact that they introduced a brand new, immensely complex process into manufacturing and it is working so well actually says a lot of good about how the trigate process is fairing. It will, of course, need some tuning and massaging. But it is already performing as well as/slightly better than the previous generation on its first release, at lower power (at least per Anand).

IVB is also farking small, which as the process matures, should mean more parts and lower prices.

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Re:Let me get this straight...

[drhank1980]

I saw a presentation a couple years ago at SPIE that has Intel showing cross sections from a sub 10nm process. They had completely wrapped the gate around the device to get those to work so the transistors were just tubes. In the same presentation, they were also showing that the current / voltage improvements between the 32nm node and the 22nm node were much more like the improvements from the 130nm to the 90nm nodes (65nm to 45nm to 32nm have all leaked too much to get much bang for the buck on the shrinks), so theoretically the next generation 22nm Haswell may see some clock improvements again but we will have to see as there are significant challenges in shrinking the 1st layer of metal interconnect that may sink any improvements in the transistor performance.

Also at this same conference the TSMC CEO was very confident that they could make devices that worked well at 7-8nm; the real question was could you manufacture those in a cost effective way as EUV lithography is too slow and going to triple pattern 193nm immersion is going to to be very expensive.