Ivy Bridge-E to hit Q4 2012, will be compatible with LGA2011 and X79

Ivy Bridge-E will be compatible with LGA2011 boards, comes in Q4 2012.

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If you're just getting over this week's launch of Intel's Sandy Bridge-E CPUs, you might want to hold your breath just a little bit longer. Less than a week since its launch, Sandy Bridge-E is now sounding old with its successor taking shape over at Intel, with a release date for Q4 2012.

Ivy Bridge-E to hit Q4 2012, will be compatible with LGA2011 and X79 | TweakTown.com

That's not the good part, the good part is that according to a leaked internal slide scored at XFastest, Ivy Bridge-E will be compatible with today's Intel X79 platform, and LGA2011 socket. This makes a SB-E upgrade that much better, as 12 months from now you can just buy an Ivy Bridge-E CPU, slot it in and away you go. You might need a BIOS flash to get there, but it makes a SB-E upgrade not so scary.

Ivy Bridge-E will be built on a 22nm silicon fabrication process, and shouldn't be much more than a shrink of SB-E. We could see the shrink allowing some headroom for enabling some of its components that have been locked away for SB-E. The fastest SB-E silicon physically holds 8 cores and 20MB of L3 cache, but the fastest SB-E-based Core processor has just six of those cores, and 15MB L3 cache enabled.

We might see a 16-core chip with 20MB-plus cache with Ivy Bridge-E. I think I just got excited, I just need to be hooked up with a SB-E chip, motherboard and RAM now. Does anyone want to send me an early Christmas present?

Anthony joined the TweakTown team in 2010 and has since reviewed 100s of graphics cards. Anthony is a long time PC enthusiast with a passion of hate for games built around consoles. FPS gaming since the pre-Quake days, where you were insulted if you used a mouse to aim, he has been addicted to gaming and hardware ever since. Working in IT retail for 10 years gave him great experience with custom-built PCs. His addiction to GPU tech is unwavering and has recently taken a keen interest in artificial intelligence (AI) hardware.

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