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!