Intel has officially launched its latest generation of CPUs, codenamed Ivy Bridge, making the world’s first 22 nanometer processor cores featuring “tri-gate” 3D transistor technology available to the public. The quad-core versions of the new Ivy Bridge processors will be available for regular laptops and desktop PCs immediately, although the dual-core versions suitable for thinner Ultrabooks will be announced later this spring.
Meet the revolutionary 3rd generation Intel Core processors.
According to Mark Bohr, Intel senior fellow and director of process architecture and integration, the new tri-gate transistor technology implemented in Ivy Bridge has been in development for 11 years since 2001, when the company first started working on 3D transistors. Intel made the decision to go with the 3D transistor architecture back in 2008, producing the first test Ivy Bridge wafers in 2010. And now that the new chips – referred to as Intel’s third-generation Core family – hit the market, consumers have the opportunity to take advantage of the new transistor technology to benefit from more computational power, greater efficiency and improved performance.
Besides the processing power and efficiency gains made possible with the tri-gate technology, the new chips come with brand new integrated GPU (graphics processing unit), offering more than twice the average graphics and media performance compared to the existing Sandy Bridge processor series. For everyday consumers this means better support for higher-resolution hardware and content as well as improved media transcoding rates. The new Ivy Bridge processor cores are available with two graphic flavors – the Intel HD Graphics 2500 and the Intel HD Graphics 4000, and offer support for DirectX 11, Open CL 1.1, and Open GL 3.1.
Other new features in the Ivy Bridge family of processors include native support for USB 3.0; PCI Express 3.0; OS Guard; improved Anti-Theft Technology with remote lock and unlock features; faster Quick Sync Video; new hardware security features and many more.
With an unprecedented combination of performance improvement, power reduction and a set of new features, Intel’s new Ivy Bridge CPUs are ideally suited for any type of device – from the smallest handhelds to powerful cloud servers. The new Ivy Bridge processor cores will soon be used to power ServerPoint.com’s dedicated servers allowing our dedicated hosting and cloud VPS hosting customers to take advantage of the power and performance gains that Ivy Bridge CPUs offer.