Ivy Bridge (microarchitecture)

Ivy Bridge is a 2012 CPUmicroarchitecture developed by Intel, and is used for third generation Core and Xeon v2-branded processors. As a 22 nmdie shrink of its 32 nm predecessor, Sandy Bridge, it is the first Intel product to feature FinFETtransistors. Ivy Bridge is the tick in the company's tick–tock model. Ivy Bridge is manufactured mainly as multi-core processors, with number of cores ranging from 1 to up to 15.

Ivy Bridge processors are backward compatible with the Sandy Bridge platform, but may require a firmware (BIOS) update depending on motherboard vendor. In 2011, Intel released the 7-series Panther Pointchipsets with integrated USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 to complement Ivy Bridge.

Volume production of Ivy Bridge chips began in the third quarter of 2011. Quad-core 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, were announced and available the first week of September 2012.

Ivy Bridge is the last Intel platform on which Windows older than Windows 7 and Windows Server older than Windows Server 2008 R2 are officially supported by Microsoft. It is also the earliest Intel microarchitecture to officially support Windows 10 64-bit (NT 10.0).

Even after the release of the Haswell microarchitecture in June 2013, the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture continued to be produced with new models introduced up until March 2014, and were discontinued in June 2015 for desktop and mobile units and January 2016 for server and workstation units.