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Ivy Bridge rumors
Not really terribly confident, but some interesting rumors, and should be interesting if it pans out to be true:
http://hardforum.com/showthread.php?t=1644469
Release date pegged at "First Half 2012"
They will stick with the Core i3/i5/i7 model names, and K still means unlocked multiplier. The series will jump to the 3000 model numbers.
The old Celeron brand name and base Pentium lines (the bottom bins) get merged into just Pentium G2000 series. (not that anyone here probably cares about this)
DDR3-1600 will be the new standard memory speed, retaining dual channel.
The graphic is somewhat vague, but it claims all i3's and i5's are "4 threads" - not sure if that's a dual core hyperthread, or a quad core w/o hyperthreading, or if there will be a mix of both. i7's are listed as "8 thread".
Most interesting, the top bins are rated at 77W TDP, and scale downwards to 35W for mobile bins.
No word on the on-chip graphics, other than some distinction between which bins are getting the better graphics cores (all i7's, certain i5/i3 models). Chipsets will support up to 3 displays.
P67/Z68 Chipsets ~may~ be backwards compatible. The socket (1155) stays the same, but it requires a new UEFI firmware, and not all current motherboards may be compatible. Apparently current Intel-brand motherboards don't have enough NVRAM to store the new firmware.
Newer motherboards with the Panther Point/Maho Bay 7-series chipset (not the X79 Patsburg/Waimea Bay - that's socket 2011) will be backwards compatible with current Sandy Bridge CPUs (the graphic lists them as Z75/Z77, along with some mobile/business/consumer (Q/B/H) series). It doesn't appear there will be another P-series chipset that disables the on-die graphics entirely.
The chipset is still a mess, the Z77 sporting 14 USB ports (only 4 are USB3), 6 SATA ports (only 2 are SATA3), PCI3.0 but at 1x16/2x8/1x8+2x4. The Z75 drops SRT support (the SSD as a hybrid cache thing), and the H77 drops multi-PCI support (buts adds SRT back in) - although all Z-series and the H77 support overclocking -- this is based on some dated data so it may be updated by now
http://www.anandtech.com/show/4318/intel-roadmap-ivy-bridge-panther-point-ssds/2
Comments
What do you think the $$ tag will be on them?
*Corsair Obsidian Series 650D *i5-2500K OC'd ~ 4.5
*Asus P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 mother board
* Radeon HD 7970
*8GB (4GBx2) 1600MHz Kingston HyperX
*240GB Corsair Force GT Series SATA-III SSD
i7 2700k (next week maybe?) is said to be around $330 so i imagine the 3700k will be a fair whack above that when it comes out around march next year.
say you have a good OC'd 2500k or 2600k and it is not bottlenecking anything at all or even coming close to for gaming, what would the point be in upgrading to one of these anywhere near in the future..?
*Corsair Obsidian Series 650D *i5-2500K OC'd ~ 4.5
*Asus P8Z68-V PRO/GEN3 mother board
* Radeon HD 7970
*8GB (4GBx2) 1600MHz Kingston HyperX
*240GB Corsair Force GT Series SATA-III SSD
Ive yet to see any 2500K or 2600K come even CLOSE to bottlenecking a rig yet. In fact, my last build was a good mainstream rig setup. Not going into specifics but it was a i5 2500K matched with a 6950, when i build my rigs i usually ask my customer if they want me to throw an overclock in on the CPU and/or GPU before i send it out to them. This customer just wanted the GPU overclocked. So i overclocked the 6950 about 20%, and even with the 2500K still running at all stock clocks, the 6950 was still bottlenecking way before the 2500K even came close to this.
Im excited to see how much faster the 3xxx series Intels will run, but when it comes to gaming, you most likely wont see a difference. I mean, as of right now, the 2500K and 2600K are nearly identicle when it comes to gaming and youll see no difference, but for other programs the 2600K is noticebly faster.
Interesting, but I'll wait for Quizzical to confirm.
An i5-2500k is something like 4 times faster than my current processor (Core2 Duo 84xx) so going beyond that gets into more money than it's worth (for me). I don't really even feel that compelled to upgrade right now...everything seems to be running fine.
However, if you have more money than you really know what to do with, then you should definitely upgrade so prices will drop to the point that the rest of us can buy chips like this.
I can not remember winning or losing a single debate on the internet.
I'd think you'd want to wait for Intel to confirm, because no one, not even Quiz, can really say much until they say it.
But people who still have those Nehalems (and older), or most any AMD chip, may see a good boost by skipping Sandy Bridge entirely and going to Ivy Bridge.
As far as price goes, I actually expect them to be in line with current Sandy Bridge prices. When Sandy Bridge came out, they were actually cheaper than a lot of Nahelem/Gulftown processors they replaced (although motherboards, since they were new, where a good bit more expensive). I would be surprised if the price of the CPU's went up or down significantly.