Ivy Bridge is the

codename A code name, call sign or cryptonym is a code word or name used, sometimes clandestinely, to refer to another name, word, project, or person. Code names are often used for military purposes, or in espionage. They may also be used in industrial c ...

for Intel's

22 nm The 22 nm node is the process step following 32 nm in CMOS MOSFET semiconductor device fabrication. The typical half-pitch (i.e., half the distance between identical features in an array) for a memory cell using the process is around 22 nm. ...

microarchitecture used in the third generation of the Intel Core processors (

Core i7 The following is a list of Intel Core i7 brand microprocessors. Introduced in 2008, the Core i7 line of microprocessors are intended to be used by high-end users. Desktop processors Nehalem microarchitecture (1st generation) "Bloomfield" ...

, i5, i3). Ivy Bridge is a

die shrink The term die shrink (sometimes optical shrink or process shrink) refers to the scaling of metal-oxide-semiconductor (MOS) devices. The act of shrinking a die is to create a somewhat identical circuit using a more advanced fabrication process, ...

process based on

FinFET A fin field-effect transistor (FinFET) is a multigate device, a MOSFET (metal-oxide-semiconductor field-effect transistor) built on a substrate where the gate is placed on two, three, or four sides of the channel or wrapped around the channel, ...

("3D")

Tri-Gate transistor The 22 nm node is the process step following 32 nm process, 32 nm in CMOS MOSFET semiconductor device fabrication. The typical half-pitch (i.e., half the distance between identical features in an array) for a memory cell using the process is arou ...

s, from the former generation's

32 nm The 32 nm node is the step following the 45 nm process in CMOS (MOSFET) semiconductor device fabrication. "32-nanometre" refers to the average half-pitch (i.e., half the distance between identical features) of a memory cell at this technology le ...

Sandy Bridge microarchitecture—also known as

tick–tock model Tick–tock was a production model adopted in 2007 by chip manufacturer Intel. Under this model, every microarchitecture change (tock) was followed by a die shrink of the process technology (tick). It was replaced by the process–architecture– ...

. The name is also applied more broadly to the

Xeon Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same a ...

and

Ivy Bridge-E series of processors released in 2013. Ivy Bridge processors are

backward compatible Backward compatibility (sometimes known as backwards compatibility) is a property of an operating system, product, or technology that allows for interoperability with an older legacy system, or with input designed for such a system, especially in ...

with the Sandy Bridge platform, but such systems might require a firmware update (vendor specific). In 2011, Intel released the 7-series

Panther Point The Platform Controller Hub (PCH) is a family of Intel's single-chip chipsets, first introduced in 2009. It is the successor to the Intel Hub Architecture, which used two chips - a northbridge and southbridge, and first appeared in the Intel 5 ...

chipsets In a computer system, a chipset is a set of electronic components in one or more integrated circuits known as a "Data Flow Management System" that manages the data flow between the processor, memory and peripherals. It is usually found on the mo ...

with integrated

USB 3.0 USB 3.0, released in November 2008, is the third major version of the Universal Serial Bus (USB) standard for interfacing computers and electronic devices. Among other improvements, USB 3.0 adds the new transfer rate referred to as '' ...

and SATA 3.0 to complement Ivy Bridge. Volume production of Ivy Bridge chips began in the third quarter of 2011.

Quad-core A multi-core processor is a microprocessor on a single integrated circuit with two or more separate processing units, called cores, each of which reads and executes program instructions. The instructions are ordinary CPU instructions (such a ...

and dual-core-mobile models launched on April 29, 2012 and May 31, 2012 respectively. Core i3 desktop processors, as well as the first 22 nm

Pentium Pentium is a brand used for a series of x86 architecture-compatible microprocessors produced by Intel. The original Pentium processor from which the brand took its name was first released on March 22, 1993. After that, the Pentium II and P ...

, were announced and available the first week of September 2012. Ivy Bridge is the last Intel platform to fully support

Windows XP Windows XP is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It was released to manufacturing on August 24, 2001, and later to retail on October 25, 2001. It is a direct upgrade to its predecessors, Windows 2000 for high-end and ...

and the earliest Intel microarchitecture to officially support

Windows 10 Windows 10 is a major release of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system. It is the direct successor to Windows 8.1, which was released nearly two years earlier. It was released to manufacturing on July 15, 2015, and later to retail on J ...

64-bit.

Overview

The Ivy Bridge CPU microarchitecture is a shrink from Sandy Bridge and remains largely unchanged. Like its predecessor, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge was also primarily developed by Intel's Israel branch, located in

Haifa, Israel Haifa ( he, חֵיפָה ' ; ar, حَيْفَا ') is the third-largest city in Israel—after Jerusalem and Tel Aviv—with a population of in . The city of Haifa forms part of the Haifa metropolitan area, the third-most populous metropol ...

. Notable improvements include: * New 22 nm

Tri-gate transistor The 22 nm node is the process step following 32 nm process, 32 nm in CMOS MOSFET semiconductor device fabrication. The typical half-pitch (i.e., half the distance between identical features in an array) for a memory cell using the process is arou ...

("3-D") technology offer as much as a 50% reduction to power consumption at the same performance level as compared to 2-D planar transistors on Intel's 32 nm process. * A new

pseudorandom number generator A pseudorandom number generator (PRNG), also known as a deterministic random bit generator (DRBG), is an algorithm for generating a sequence of numbers whose properties approximate the properties of sequences of random numbers. The PRNG-generate ...

and the

RDRAND RDRAND (for "read random"; known as Intel Secure Key Technology, previously known as Bull Mountain) is an instruction for returning random numbers from an Intel on-chip hardware random number generator which has been seeded by an on-chip entropy s ...

instruction, codenamed Bull Mountain.

Ivy Bridge features and performance

The mobile and desktop Ivy Bridge chips also include some minor yet notable changes over Sandy Bridge:

CPU

F16C The F16C (previously/informally known as CVT16) instruction set is an x86 instruction set architecture extension which provides support for converting between half-precision and standard IEEE single-precision floating-point formats. History T ...

(16-bit floating-point conversion instructions) *

instruction (Intel Secure Key) * Max

CPU multiplier In computing, the clock multiplier (or CPU multiplier or bus/core ratio) sets the ratio of an internal CPU clock rate to the externally supplied clock. A CPU with a 10x multiplier will thus see 10 internal cycles (produced by PLL-based frequency ...

of 63 (versus 57 for Sandy Bridge) *

Configurable TDP The thermal design power (TDP), sometimes called thermal design point, is the maximum amount of heat generated by a computer chip or component (often a CPU, GPU or system on a chip) that the cooling system in a computer is designed to dissipate ...

(cTDP) for mobile processors * A 14- to 19-stage

instruction pipeline In computer engineering, instruction pipelining or ILP is a technique for implementing instruction-level parallelism within a single processor. Pipelining attempts to keep every part of the processor busy with some instruction by dividing inco ...

, depending on the

micro-operation cache A CPU cache is a hardware cache used by the central processing unit (CPU) of a computer to reduce the average cost (time or energy) to access data from the main memory. A cache is a smaller, faster memory, located closer to a processor core, which ...

hit or miss :

GPU

* The built-in

GPU A graphics processing unit (GPU) is a specialized electronic circuit designed to manipulate and alter memory to accelerate the creation of images in a frame buffer intended for output to a display device. GPUs are used in embedded systems, mobi ...

has 6 or 16

execution units In computer engineering, an execution unit (E-unit or EU) is a part of the central processing unit (CPU) that performs the operations and calculations as instructed by the computer program. It may have its own internal control sequence unit (not ...

(EUs), compared to Sandy Bridge's 6 or 12. *

Intel HD Graphics Intel Graphics Technology (GT) is the collective name for a series of integrated graphics processors (IGPs) produced by Intel that are manufactured on the same package or die as the central processing unit (CPU). It was first introduced in 2010 ...

with

DirectX 11 Microsoft DirectX is a collection of application programming interfaces (APIs) for handling tasks related to multimedia, especially game programming and video, on Microsoft platforms. Originally, the names of these APIs all began with "Direct", ...

, OpenGL 4.0, and OpenCL 1.2 support on Windows. On Linux, OpenGL 4.2 is supported since

Mesa A mesa is an isolated, flat-topped elevation, ridge or hill, which is bounded from all sides by steep escarpments and stands distinctly above a surrounding plain. Mesas characteristically consist of flat-lying soft sedimentary rocks capped by a ...

17.1. * Support for up to three displays (with some limitations: with chipset of 7-series and using two of them with DisplayPort or eDP) * Multiple 4K displays video playback *

Intel Quick Sync Video Intel Quick Sync Video is Intel's brand for its dedicated video encoding and decoding hardware core. Quick Sync was introduced with the Sandy Bridge CPU microarchitecture on 9 January 2011 and has been found on the die of Intel CPUs ever since. ...

version 2

IO

* RAM support up to 2800

MT/s In computer technology, transfers per second and its more common secondary terms gigatransfers per second (abbreviated as GT/s) and megatransfers per second (MT/s) are informal language that refer to the number of operations transferring data that ...

in 200 MHz increments *

DDR3L Double Data Rate 3 Synchronous Dynamic Random-Access Memory (DDR3 SDRAM) is a type of synchronous dynamic random-access memory (SDRAM) with a high bandwidth ("double data rate") interface, and has been in use since 2007. It is the higher-speed ...

for mobile CPUs * PCI Express 3.0 support (omitted on Core i3, Pentium, and ultra-low-voltage LVprocessors)

Benchmark comparisons

Compared to its predecessor, Sandy Bridge: * 3% to 6% increase in CPU performance when compared clock for clock * 25% to 68% increase in integrated GPU performance

Thermal performance issues

Ivy Bridge's temperatures are reportedly 10°C higher compared to Sandy Bridge when a CPU is overclocked, even at default voltage setting. Impress PC Watch, a Japanese website, performed experiments that confirmed earlier speculations that this is because Intel used a poor quality (and perhaps lower cost)

thermal interface material A thermal interface material (shortened to TIM) is any material that is inserted between two components in order to enhance the thermal coupling between them. A common use is heat dissipation, in which the TIM is inserted between a heat-producing de ...

(thermal paste, or "TIM") between the chip and the

heat spreader A heat spreader transfers energy as heat from a hotter source to a colder heat sink or heat exchanger. There are two thermodynamic types, passive and active. The most common sort of passive heat spreader is a plate or block of material having hi ...

, instead of the fluxless solder of previous generations. The mobile Ivy Bridge processors are not affected by this issue because they do not use a heat spreader between the chip and cooling system. Socket 2011 Ivy Bridge processors continue to use the solder. Enthusiast reports describe the TIM used by Intel as low-quality, and not up to par for a "premium" CPU, with some speculation that this is by design to encourage sales of prior processors. Further analyses caution that the processor can be damaged or void its warranty if home users attempt to remedy the matter. The TIM has much lower

thermal conductivity The thermal conductivity of a material is a measure of its ability to conduct heat. It is commonly denoted by k, \lambda, or \kappa. Heat transfer occurs at a lower rate in materials of low thermal conductivity than in materials of high thermal ...

, causing heat to trap on the die. Experiments with replacing this TIM with a higher-quality one or other heat removal methods showed a substantial temperature drop, and improvements to the increased voltages and overclocking sustainable by Ivy Bridge chips. Intel claims that the smaller die of Ivy Bridge and the related increase in thermal density is expected to result in higher temperatures when the CPU is overclocked; Intel also stated that this is as expected and will likely not improve in future revisions.

Models and steppings

All Ivy Bridge processors with one, two, or four cores report the same CPUID model 0x000306A9, and are built in four different configurations differing in the number of cores, L3 cache and GPU execution units.

Ivy Bridge–based Xeon processors

Intel Ivy Bridge–based Xeon microprocessors (also known as Ivy Bridge-E) is the follow-up to

Sandy Bridge-E Intel Sandy Bridge-based Xeon microprocessors (often referred to as Sandy Bridge-E) are microprocessors based on the Intel's 32 nm Sandy Bridge architecture for servers, workstations, and high-end desktops. It succeeds the six-core Gulftown/Westm ...

, using the same CPU core as the Ivy Bridge processor, but in

LGA 2011 LGA 2011, also called ''Socket R'', is a CPU socket by Intel released on November 14, 2011. It launched along with LGA 1356 to replace its predecessor, LGA 1366 (Socket B) and LGA 1567. While LGA 1356 was designed for dual-processor or ...

LGA 1356 LGA 1356, also called Socket B2, is an Intel microprocessor socket released in Q1 2012 with 1356 Land Grid Array pins. It launched alongside LGA 2011 to replace its predecessor, LGA 1366 (Socket B) and LGA 1567. It's compatible with Intel Sandy ...

and LGA 2011-1 packages for workstations and servers. Additional high-end server processors based on the Ivy Bridge architecture, code named Ivytown, were announced September 10, 2013 at the

Intel Developer Forum The Intel Developer Forum (IDF) was a biannual gathering of technologists to discuss Intel products and products based on Intel products. The first IDF was held in 1997. To emphasize the importance of China, the Spring 2007 IDF was held in Beiji ...

, after the usual one year interval between consumer and server product releases. The Ivy Bridge-EP processor line announced in September 2013 has up to 12 cores and 30 MB third level cache, with rumors of Ivy Bridge-EX up to 15 cores and an increased third level cache of up to 37.5 MB, (citin
an original post by Hassan Mujtaba on the same website
although an early leaked lineup of Ivy Bridge-E included processors with a maximum of 6 cores. Both Core-i7 and Xeon versions are produced: the Xeon versions marketed as Xeon E5-1400 V2 act as drop-in replacements for the existing Sandy Bridge-EN based Xeon E5, Xeon E5-2600 V2 versions act as drop-in replacements for the existing Sandy Bridge-EP based Xeon E5, while Core-i7 versions designated i7-4820K, i7-4930K and i7-4960X were released on September 10, 2013, remaining compatible with the X79 and

hardware. For the intermediate

socket, Intel launched the Xeon E5-2400 V2 (codenamed Ivy Bridge-EN) series in January 2014. These have up to 10 cores. A new Ivy Bridge-EX line marketed as Xeon E7 V2 had no corresponding predecessor using the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture but instead followed the older

Westmere-EX Xeon ( ) is a brand of x86 microprocessors designed, manufactured, and marketed by Intel, targeted at the non-consumer workstation, server, and embedded system markets. It was introduced in June 1998. Xeon processors are based on the same ar ...

processors.

List of Ivy Bridge processors

Processors featuring Intel's HD 4000 graphics (or HD P4000 for Xeon) are set in bold. Other processors feature HD 2500 graphics or HD Graphics unless indicated by N/A.

Desktop processors

List of announced desktop processors, as follows:

Requires a compatible motherboard.

Suffixes to denote: * K Unlocked (adjustable CPU multiplier up to 63 times) * S Performance-optimized lifestyle (low power with 65 W TDP) * T Power-optimized lifestyle (ultra-low power consumption with 35–45 W TDP) * P No on-die video chipset * X Extreme performance (adjustable CPU ratio with no ratio limit)

Server processors

Mobile processors

Suffixes to denote: * M Mobile processor * Q Quad-core * U Ultra-low power * X Extreme performance (adjustable CPU ratio with no ratio limit) * Y Extreme ultra-low power

Roadmap

Intel demonstrated the Haswell architecture in September 2011, which began release in 2013 as the successor to

Sandy Bridge Sandy Bridge is the codename for Intel's 32 nm microarchitecture used in the second generation of the Intel Core processors (Core i7, i5, i3). The Sandy Bridge microarchitecture is the successor to Nehalem and Westmere microarchitecture ...

and Ivy Bridge.

Fixes

Microsoft has released a microcode update for selected Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge CPUs for Windows 7 and up that addresses stability issues. The update, however, negatively impacts Intel G3258 and 4010U CPU models.

Notes

References

External links

* * * * * * {{DEFAULTSORT:Ivy Bridge Intel x86 microprocessors Computer-related introductions in 2012 Intel microarchitectures fr:Ivy Bridge