Ivy Bridge Thread

[Primeinator]

Originally Posted by Dubslow

Ivy Bridge looks like the perfect upgrade for you!
[/fanboy]

Not on a college budget, it doesn't

[ixfd64]

It looks like Ivy Bridge will be up to 16% faster than Sandy Bridge at the same clock speed: http://www.fudzilla.com/home/item/25...n-sandy-bridge

[Dubslow]

That appears to be more of a "higher turbo boost" than architectural.

[emily]

Intel releases processors on a Tick-Tock schedule, where each new microarchitecture is followed by a new fabrication minimization and thus a reduction in die size for the same number of transistors.

SandyBridge was a new microarchitecture using the same 32nm process as the previous CPUs. Ivy Bridge will use a new 22nm process, so it won't be a new microarchitecture.

Where does the speed bump comes from if Ivy bridge is the same microarchitecture as SandyBridge?

By the way, I know the next microarchitecture, Haswell (on 22nm), will use 64KB L1 caches instead of 32KB. Will this help LL testing?

[ixfd64]

I would assume it's due to the new Tri-Gate transistors.

[Dubslow]

What do you mean speed bump? It is the same MA, yes, but they do add more fixes/optimizations/etc., and IPC can probably be expected to go up a few percent. The trigates at 22 nm means faster clock speeds for the same or less power, so increased speed there as well.

And yes, I imagine the increased cache size will help, though maybe not immensely. If it were data cache increase or L2/L3 increase, I think that'd help more. (I must disclaim that I am making an educated guess, and other more knowledgeable people should double check/correct me.)

[ldesnogu]

Originally Posted by emily

SandyBridge was a new microarchitecture using the same 32nm process as the previous CPUs. Ivy Bridge will use a new 22nm process, so it won't be a new microarchitecture.

Where does the speed bump comes from if Ivy bridge is the same microarchitecture as SandyBridge?

Even though the microarchitecture doesn't thoroughly change, Intel tunes a few things, hence the speedup.

[Dubslow]

http://www.anandtech.com/show/5626/i...core-i7-3770k/

It's a few weeks old, but still pretty cool.

- FP/integer divider delivers 2x throughput compared to Sandy Bridge
- MOV instructions no longer occupy an execution port, potential for improved ILP when MOVs are present

^ -- George -- what sort of increase are we looking at there? (Are there a lot of divs in FFTs?)

Max supported DDR3 frequency is now 2800MHz (up from 2133MHz), memory speed can be moved in 200MHz increments

I'm not sure if the "standard" clock of 1333 MHz will go up (e.g. less premiums on the faster mem, but that's more a mem-ufacture decision rather than Intel's), but it's still nice to see, especially with the memory bottlenecks introduced by AVX.

Release date appears to be late April to early June.
http://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/37129...ates-revealed/
http://www.cpu-world.com/news_2012/2...confirmed.html
http://us.generation-nt.com/intel-iv...s-3465751.html
(^ largely duplicate)

[Prime95]

Originally Posted by Dubslow

^ -- George -- what sort of increase are we looking at there?.

0%

[Dubslow]

Intel Z77 Panther Point Chipset and Motherboard Preview – ASRock, ASUS, Gigabyte, MSI, ECS and Biostar

Well, today is a day that everyone was expecting but not the most exciting day of the month. Today, Intel officially releases the spate of 7-series chipsets for their 3rd generation Core microarchitecture processors (read—Ivy Bridge), despite the actual release of the processors being another three weeks away. This means that today we can actually look at, test, or purchase the range of motherboards that natively support Ivy Bridge. However, we can’t officially publish all the benchmarks for these products using Ivy Bridge until that date three weeks away (to be honest, we are still testing!). So today we are going to have a good in depth look into the Z77 chipset itself, and the review products we have received to let you know what we think looks good. All these boards today will be fully reviewed, warts and all, with Ivy Bridge, as close to official release as possible.

For the high-end power user, the chipset is now geared to handle memory that is more powerful. Again, thanks to the improvement on the new processors, these combined systems should be able to handle (with ease) DDR3-2800 memory. The memory dividers work similar to the gear ratios in Sandy Bridge-E, with users able to call a larger array of memory dividers than before with up to 200 MHz increments. This is of great benefit to the integrated graphics on the new generation processors, which should benefit from the purchase of a higher end memory kit to provide enough bandwidth.

If you happen to purchase ASUS for Ivy Bridge, there is also a little treat in store, as they have reworked the memory sub-system. Their new method stunned Intel engineers, but should provide distinct memory speed advantages. Simply put, instead of memory banks being read consecutively, the memory is read in parallel. We are awaiting more detail regarding how this feature works.

(my own emphasis)

Page 2 is not really related to this forum, but is incredibly interesting with regards to GPU fps vs. screen refresh rate, and synchronizing them.

From the end of the article, we have this expansion on ASUS/memory:

ASUS have outsmarted Intel and have decided to take their technology to another level. This is specifically in terms of memory, and how it is routed through the motherboard. Typically, routing through the memory would occur in a daisy chain type environment, whereby if data was in the furthest memory slot away from the board, it would take longer to get to the CPU, and perhaps cause synchronization issues and delays—all reads had to be done serially between sticks in the same channel.

With ASUS' new technology, they are essentially parallelizing memory reads that are commonly done serially between memory banks. This is part of their 'T-Topology' memory subsystem, which allows synchronization to be dealt with in hardware. This, according to ASUS, should allow for up to a 15% memory overclock beyond the previous methodology, where the motherboard is the limiting factor. In this circumstance, we could be seeing some new memory records being set in dual channel memory.

I have probed ASUS for specific details on how this works, and I am awaiting a response. I hope that by the time we are allowed to release our Ivy Bridge results on Z77 that I will have something more technical to pass on to you about how this works.

[Dubslow]

Release for the mobile processors may be as early as next week (April 23rd). No word on the desktop parts.

http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120411PD216.html
http://arstechnica.com/gadgets/news/...ultrabooks.ars

Originally Posted by Ars Technica

Intel is believed to be pushing up the launch of its first wave of Ivy Bridge processors by one week to April 23. According to sources for DigiTimes, Intel will announce availability of its next-generation 22nm processors on that day in order to pump up demand for new ultrabook models from ASUS, Acer, Lenovo, and HP.

Intel suggested in February that the highly anticipated Ivy Bridge processors, which are built using 3D tri-gate transistors on a new 22nm process, would be delayed until June. However, leaked information about the launch that surfaced just two weeks ago suggested Intel would instead roll out various processors on a staggered release schedule, with some processors becoming available at the end of April. The rest would start shipping in quantity just over a month later in early June.