The Ivy Bridge Preview: Core i7 3770K Tested - AnandTech

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I still remember hearing about Intel's tick-tock cadence and not having much faith that the company could pull it off. Granted Intel hasn't given us a new chip every 12 months on the dot, but more or less there's something new every year. Every year we either get a new architecture on an established process node (tock), or a derivative architecture on a new process node (tick). The table below summarizes what we've seen since Intel adopted the strategy: Intel's Tick-Tock Cadence Microarchitecture Process Node Tick or Tock Release Year Conroe/Merom 65nm Tock 2006 Penryn 45nm Tick 2007 Nehalem 45nm Tock 2008 Westmere 32nm Tick 2010 Sandy Bridge 32nm Tock 2011 Ivy Bridge 22nm Tick 2012 Haswell 22nm Tock 2013 Last year was a big one.*Sandy Bridge*brought a Conroe-like increase in performance across the board thanks to a massive re-plumbing of Intel's out-of-order execution engine and other significant changes to the microarchitecture. If you remember Conroe (the first Core 2 architecture), what followed it was a relatively mild upgrade called Penryn that gave you a little bit in the way of performance and dropped power consumption at the same time. * Ivy Bridge, the follow-on to Sandy Bridge should be a tick but because of significant improvements on the GPU side Intel is calling it a tick+.*We managed to get our hands on an early Ivy Bridge system and ran it through some tests to determine exactly how much of an improvement is coming our way in a couple of months. Read on!

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