Intel Ivy Bridge Processors coming April 2012

According to Taiwanese OEMs, April 8 you will be able to go and grab yourself a desktop or mobile Ivy Bridge CPU. These will be the first chips sold to the public to use a 22nm process and the first silicon chips that use 3D tri-gate transistors.

Around 13 CPU’s will be released on April 8, seven of which will be desktop chips. All will be priced between $332 and $184 and are targeted at the mid-range market. The fastest CPU being released will be the i7-3770K, a six core CPU. The mobile chips being released will all be available for purchase the highest of which is the $1100 Core i&-3920Qm.

Don’t get too excited however. The purpose of Ivy Bridge, disappointingly, is not to increase performance within Intel’s CPUs and be the ‘sequel’ to Sandy Bridge, but to reduce power consumption. Sandy Bridge was the innovative new architecture with effective hyper threading and Ivy Bridge just kind of improves this a bit rather than being the next big step up from Sandy Bridge. This being said, some leaked benchmarks of the Ivy Bridge CPUs show that there is a 2-8% gain. According to Intel, the most powerful CPU – Core i7-3770k – will on consume just 77 watts. This is 18W less than the current most powerful Intel CPU, the i7-2700k, which consumes 95W. Pretty good eh?

This is more exciting news for the mobile sector of the CPU’s where along with backlighting the CPU consumes a vast amount of power from the device. By the looks of how Ivy Bridge will be used in everything from tablets to smart phones Intel seems to be focusing on reducing its power consumption over all products.

In addition to this for the mobile sector, the Ivy Bridge chips will feature a less-terrible integrated GPU but if you are running on an integrated GPU in a desktop, please, for the sake of everybody, go and buy a dedicated one.

The beast!

AMD Bulldozes the World Record for Overclocking

AMD’s processors have been good at achieving extremely high overclocked frequencies. It was their Phenom II processor that held the previous world record at 7.1GHz.

I must say this new record pushes the previous one aside with ease hitting 8.429GHz! To be honest my overclocked CPU is sitting around 3.8GHz and it’s a Phenom II as well and reading all this makes me feel less chuffed with myself.

Doesn't that look cool?!

The record was set by two of the world’s best overclockers using liquid helium as cooling Bearing in mind that this is now only a few degrees above absolute zero this starting to look pretty ‘cool’. Now, who wants that cooling their PC? I know I do. If any of you were wondering, AMD has announced that they did try this CPU on an air-cooled system and managed to push the CPU to 5GHz. That’s great but I’d still prefer that liquid helium.

For this event AMD flew a selected few of press down to Austin Texas for a ‘tech day’ and to see for themselves the, at that point, unreleased Bulldozer, witness its capability and watch it break the world record for highest frequency CPU.

The marvel of this overclock is that it was done with a duel core processor. It is notably easier to overclock single core CPU’s than it is multi-core CPU’s and that is why Intel Celeron CPU’s are more often than not near the top end of the high overclock chart. This does nothing but raise the bar for Intel and also for overclockers all over the world for a new standard has been set.