Intel to Detail 22-nm Ivy Bridge CPUs at ISSCC

At the 2012 ISSC (International Solid-State Circuits) conference, that is scheduled to take place in February of next year, Intel will disclose additional details about its upcoming Ivy Bridge processors based on the 22nm fabrication process.

The talks will focus on an entry-level Ivy Bridge desktop or notebook processor which uses four IA-32 cores, a graphics-processing core, memory and a PCI Express controller, all built on the 22nm fabrication node, according to EETime’s findings.

Other details about this chip were not released, but we do know that the Ivy Bridge presentation will be accompanied by another Intel talk dedicated to a low-power CPU.

This will be built using the 32nm process technology and consumes just 737 mW at 1.2V while running at 915MHz.

Ivy Bridge is the code name used for the 22nm die shrink of the current Sandy Bridge chips and features basically the same architecture, but with a few minor tweaks and improvements.

This includes a new on-die GPU that will come with full DirectX 11 support as well as with 30% more EUs than Sandy Bridge, in order to offer up to 60% faster performance that current Core CPUs according to Intel.

In addition, the processor cores have also received some minor tweaks as their AVX performance was slightly increased and Intel has updated the integrated PCI Express controller to the 3.0 standard.

In the mobile version of Ivy Bridge, all these improvements are paired with a configurable TDP design, which enables the CPU to greatly surpass its maximum thermal design power when additional cooling is provided (like when placed on a notebook cooling stand).

According to some previous rumors, Intel should be already shipping the first Ivy Bridge QS (qualification sample) chips to its partners. The retail version of Ivy Bridge is expected to arrive in March or April of 2012.

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