Intel has been busy as of late, with its new Sandy Bridge Extreme LGA-2011 platform launched two weeks ago, and the i7 Core 3960X taking the crown from the previous generation Core i7 980X as the fastest desktop processor available. The result was a foregone conclusion, given AMD's less than impressive top-of-the-line eight core "Bulldozer" FX-8150 performance when pitted against what are arguably two of Intel's best products in recent years -- the i5 Core 2500K and i7 Core 2600K.
With the Sandy Bridge Extreme launch out of the way, attention has now turned to the upcoming 22nm Ivy Bridge line-up, with full details of the entire i5 and i7 model lineup recently surfacing atCPU World.
Eleven new models are listed, covering the i5 and i7 range for mobile and desktop products. According to the site, the Ivy Bridge Core i7 family will feature 77, 65 and 45 Watt power envelopes, which correspond to suffix/"K", "S" and "T" processor numbers respectively. These are detailed in the charts below:
If the information above is correct, then it appears that most of the Ivy Bridge i5 processors will continue on from Sandy Bridge offering four physical cores, 6MB of L3 cache and no hyper-threading, except for the i5 3470T which is a dual core unit with two hyper-threaded cores.
Moving on to the i7 range, it appears they will continue in much the same way at their Sandy Bridge counterparts, running four physical cores with hyper-threading support, and 2MB more cache available. The new range topping Ivy Bridge part will launch as the i7 3770K, fully unlocked with a 3.5GHz clock speed, where as the "non-K" designated i7 3770 drops down 100MHz to 3.4GHz.
Therefore, in total consumers should see two unlocked, three mainstream, three mid-power level processors and three low power models which presumably will find their way into notebooks on the market once released -- with current estimates hinting at a launch date around April 2012.
