Intel Ivy Bridge Platform Review

The PC industry has been waiting patiently for this day to arrive as it finally marks the transition to 22nm for desktop processors and all credit goes to Intel in being the first to make it happen. Today marks the day Intel launches their Ivy Bridge series of processors or 3rd Generation Core processor and the first bit of good news is that you don’t need a new motherboard! This is great news for DIY’ers looking for an upgrade and it’s nice to see Intel take a cue from AMD, at least as far as backwards compatibility goes. Intel will be launching CPUs and chipsets for the desktop and mobile platform and today we’ll be taking a look at their desktop platform to see how it stacks up against Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge-E.The CPU and chipsetNow before we proceed, here’s a couple of things you need to know about Ivy Bridge. This step represents a ‘Tick’ in Intel ‘Tick-Tock’ cycle of upgrades. The ‘Tick’ stage is merely a die shrink of their current architecture, in this case, Sandy Bridge. Ivy Bridge is still based on the same microarchitecture as Sandy Bridge, only difference is that it’s based on the 22nm fabrication process instead of 32nm. Of course, it’s not just a die shrink as Intel has added some new features as well to Ivy Bridge which we’ll get into in a bit.

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