More Details on Intel's Ivy Bridge and Maho Bay Leaked

So this means pcie 3.0, usb 3.0, IGP with dx11, similar naming scheme, lower tdp...if they manage to deliver decent entry level gpu performance while delivering on their promised performance increase over sandy bridge, intel have a huge win lined up for them.

i hope amd gets its act together soon enough...

So ivy bridge is going to be a very very nice gaming build with new 7000 series or nvidia 600 series cards.

intel seems to be well on track with their ivy bridge/ maho bay platform.
only diff. between z77 and z75 are fewer pcie 3 lanes? damn segmentation...
glad to see Pxx chipset being phased out. Pxx chipset was alredy less relevant with sandy bridge than it was with nehalem.

where is X58 chipset?

x-series is intel's enthusiast oriented chipset. if intel does release one for ivb, it'll most likely to come out in q4 or late q4 2012. intel's current enthusiast chipset is x79.

Motherboards with the Z77 chipset and PCIe 3.0 coupled with Ivy Bridge will be the ones to get if you still haven't gotten SB and are waiting for IB FINALLY we'll be able to get true tri-CF/SLI in a motherboard under $200. While two of the slots would be running at 4x, remember that they support PCIe 3.0 and it's therefore the equivalent of PCIe 2.0 x8. And since the 28nm GPUs from NVIDIA and AMD will support it, we'll get a true solution at last. Since the chipset will also support USB 3.0, vendors can combine both the chipset and add a Marvell or ASMedia controller so we can have 6 to 10 USB 3.0 through I/O ports and headers. Yay!

A nice gaming platform for sure, but a feature set not much different than the current sandy 6-series. Many 6 series boards have pcie3.0 support, usb 3.0, etc. Not to mention current, and probably next gen, graphics cards don't even saturate pcie 2.0 bandwidth.

Is there any chance the new chipsets will come before the CPU's

For most users. Unfortunately, most people buying desktops and even laptops today are gaming users who need a little more 'oomph' than any Intel GPU would bring to the table.

I'm not planning to build another system "this soon"...
But this are still good news.



Not to mention that an article on Tom's with no mention of certain "fruit" is refreshing.

X79 is like X58, but won't be around as long. Anyone who buys it will be disappointed just like X58 users were when something faster for 1/2 the price comes out 2 months later. Trust me. Wait for IB.

Probably true even with the IB top-end GPU which Intel says will be some 60% faster than the one in Sandy Bridge, although S/A has an articlen mentioning 2X performance. It should be comparable to LLano's.

Looks nice but I already have a motherboard that does PCI 3.0, i7 2600, OCZ SSD and it runs buttery smooth no matter what I throw at it. At this point in the game everything else is just overkill unless you use CAD or do video editing.

for the love of god toms will you make it so if you post a damn picture when you click, it will actually link to a MUCH larger image, not one thats like 50% bigger?

I never got Sandy Bridge because my i7 920 on x58 has lasted me going on 4 years, at 4ghz on air I barely do anything to push it. I only want Ivy Bridge for full usb3 + SAS (and the better power use) but not necessarily more power on the processor, which is of course a nice byproduct of Moore's law.

I am saddened that they aren't using the significant amount of extra space on the die to throw another two cores on the high end model. If they are using the same die cast as Sandy Bridge I'm amazed they can't fit another 2 cores on it by shrinking it by a third.

so true. I am currently on an x58 with an i7 930, I've been holding off for the Ivy Bridge to upgrade my desktop. Although it has been hard to resist the lure of SB all this time.

man. It's looking like I'll have to switch to Intel for my next upgrade.......but money tends to put me toward AMD. I wind up saying, "Aaahhh, I can give up the performance." haha. But seriously, using the tri-gate, I wonder how far you could overclock that thing with the extra heat dissipation. I'd think it'd be pretty far, but it is a first generation tri-gate, so maybe best to wait for the 2nd iteration of the tech.

Yeah, kind of crazy. You have to click to get a slightly larger picture and then click on it to get the big one.

stupid way of showing images. Please stop!

Your such a noob. An X58 paired with CF/SLI in dual/triple or quad SLI configs and a nice OC'ed i7 920 will still run circles around anything you probably have. That is what it was meant for not as a cheap generic platform. I had quad SLI running on my X58 for years until recently I threw in a single GTX590 and I still see no reason to get something new but you wouldn't understand that.

@zanny: If IB is just the Intel "tick", then the "tock" that comes next will bring significant architecture changes... though the change in GPU performance would tend to conflict with this a bit...

I'm surprised at only 1-2 SATA III ports on these chipsets. I know the current HDDs can't come anywhere close to saturating a port (unless pulling from cache...), but if the peak for SATA II is ~265 MB/s (as observed during THW SSD tests, which is less than the 300 MB theoretical), then using a port multiplier to attach something like a DAS could quickly saturate a SATA II port. AMD can do 6 SATA III ports on their chipsets with port multiplier support... why not Intel?

Intel's marketing department is kind of screwing over the high-end enthusiasts, if I read this correctly. X79 doesn't have USB 3.0, barely has any SATA III, and has no lightpeak. And there does not appear to be any short-term remedy to this, short of using onboard add-on chips or PCIe cards. So mainstream gets better than what enthusiasts get (albeit a few months later), and Apple fans get even better than that (WHY?)

Speaking of which, where's thunderbolt / lightpeak? I would expect that to be appearing on some of these chipsets by now. Unless it's done as a PCIe device?

Well, in my opinion, what you have is overkill.

So Ivy Bridge won't be LGA 2011? Wow, I'm such an idiot. I thought that I'll be able to get X79 + Ivy Bridge when it comes out, but in reality it's the same story as with X58 + Nehalem and P67 +Sandy Bridge, eh?

I guess this makes sense. This means that to get true 32 PCI-E 3.0 lanes to run triple SLI, I'll need to wait for the Ivy Brige-E or equivalent? And then Haswell is going to be released and smoke my setup for half the price?

I was so sad that i was forced to jump from i7-920/socket 1366 to i5 2500k sandy bridge because of motherboard going flatline.. I was sad because the difference in the performance wasn't that huge to reason an upgrade.
However , i chose Z68 chipset and oh! Good news!

"The Q67, Q65 and B65 chipsets will not support Ivy Bridge, even with a motherboard firmware update, but the Z68, P67, H67 and H61 chipsets look to all be compatible with a required UEFI update."

Good thing, i may upgrade the cpu end 2012 without swaping motherboards etc

Guys, guys, guys... we're missing the bigger picture here. Short of the integration of the usb3.0 and the pci-e 3.0 and lowered power usage how much better will this new platform make your games? The answer is "very little". Dont get me wrong it sounds sweet but like some said I have an x58 with an i7-920... got the thing the week it came out and it's still able to perform in games at almost exactly the same level as the brand new sandy bridge-e chips!

the integrated graphics will be nice for people like my dad who rarely if ever play a game and dont want to spend any money on a dedicated graphics card but would still like some level of dx11 performance. But for everyone else integrated graphics will only be useful if you can plug your monitor into it and your graphics card (via a y cable or something) and when doing 2d or low power 3d (like a screen saver) use the onboard but when you launch a game switch over to the gaming card. Otherwise integrated graphics are well laughable. Though I do suppose they had to do something with the cpu since like I said earlier... you wont see any benefit in game...

Look here

Single GPU cards barely saturate PCIe 2.0 X8. The only thing PCIe 3.0 will benefit is multiple GPUs on a single PCB. And again, you also have power restrictions placed on PCIe slots. In other terms, PCIe 3.0 is worthless, at least for the next 2-3 generations, and even then only dual GPU cards will really benefit over 2.0.

What about Lightpeak/Thunderbolt? Where is the support for that? Has Intel abandoned their own tech? Isn't that why they weren't pushing USB 3 to begin with? Why on earth would it not be integrated into their series 7 chipset?

Lower TDP = more room for OCing even on air.

depends on social factors really...in developing countries people usually wait around 5 years before upgrading (can vary of course), and most of them don't game. Like in India, a lot of computers are in circulation but most people have older desktops (p4/Core/Core 2) with newer laptops. So here integrated matters, especially since most people don't want external GPUs.

Will be kind of sad for us gamers, the demand for separate graphics solutions may fall, possibly increasing the already high prices.

77 watts, nice!

http://www.tomshardware.com/review [...] 834-7.html
Seems like Intel Graphics compare to other cards that can't play games... just bought a 9600 GSO fxf for 20$, way better then intel graphics. throw in a cheap AMD CPU and its a better cheaper platform, its memory cost less, its mobo cost less. why buy intel?