Small post about Intel chipsets and about Ivy Bridge

I just made a little post with more information on the different chipsets and about Ivy Bridge.We will be looking at the consumer desktop platform. At this point we have three different chipsets for the Sandy Bridge CPU’s. It’s easy to understand why this is confusing for some people. 

First I want to show is what’s going to follow up on to Sandy Bridge. Ivy Bridge is the “tick” in Intel’s product line. Ivy Bridge is going to have a smaller die and will be using a new kind of transistor technology namely “3D (Tri-Gate)”. Let us put the two next to each other.

	Sandy Bridge	Ivy Bridge
Manufacturing process	32nm	22nm
Transistor technology	2D(Planar)	3D (Tri-Gate)
PCI-Express version	16 lanes 2.0	16 lanes 3.0
Turbo boost version	2.0	2.0
Memory support	Up to DDR3-1333	Up to DDR3-1600
DirectX	10.1	11

These are the differences between Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge of which I am certain. There are more differences of course like IGP shader count, Quick Sync. But I have not yet seen official post about this. That’s why I kept it short but it’s easy to see the differences. The biggest change is of course the Transistor technology and of course the die shrink. I expect a performance and different power levels to increase with Ivy Bridge. The power consumption is not yet known, according to the road map of Intel they should have the same as Sandy Bridge.  Furthermore we see that the on-die PCI-Express graphics links become version 3.0. Also the official memory sped support from the IMC gets boosted to DDR-1600. Also the IGP will be different. As with Sandy Bridge i think Intel will have several IGP variations on Ivy Bridge graphics. I do not know the fine print of this though, what I do know is that they will support DX11.

The most important point for most users is that Ivy Bridge is pin compatible with Sandy Bridge, sow it will work on the current LG1155 motherboards with the appropriate chipset, a firmware and bios update.

Okay, now we now that we are in the Sandy Bridge era and Ivy Bridge is coming. What most people know is that we have an on board gpu on these processors. To be more accurate its actually embedded in the die of the processor.  And we have two kinds of processors the unlocked (K series) and the locked. Why am I bringing this up well it helps to understand the basic difference between the P67 and H67.  Basically you use the H67 for embedded gpu and no overclocking, while the P7 enables overclocking but locks of the on board gpu. 

	Chipset comparison
	Code Name		Cougar Point		Cougar Point		Cougar Point		Cougar Point
	CPU Support		Sandy Bridge  LGA-1155		Sandy Bridge  LGA-1155		Sandy Bridge  LGA-1155		Sandy Bridge LGA-1155
	Lithography		65 nm		65 nm		65 nm		65 nm
	Max TDP		6.1 W		6.1 W		6.1 W
	Integrated Graphics		Yes		No		Yes		Yes
	Intel® Clear Video  Technology		Yes		No		Yes		Yes
	Dual Display Capable		Yes				Yes		Yes
	RAID Support		Yes		Yes		No		Yes
RST SSD Caching		No		No		No		Yes

And there is one last chipset, the Z68. This one is on the market while you are reading this. But what’s new about this Z68. Well it combines the H67 and the P67 and also ads a few new features.  The Z68 gives us the possibility to use the integrated gpu  and also lets u overclock the cpu. For most people the new Z68 is going to be the way to go. For smaller builds you can still take the H67 if you have no need for overclocking and only use the integrated gpu. I just added the Z68 to our chipset comparison.

Sow this leaves us to the last part the processors. We already now that they need to be socket 1155 compatible. These processors are not called Sandy Bridge but the second generation of the Core I3, I5, I7. And the naming system follows this. To understand this even better I have a small example.

We take an Intel® Core™ i5-2500K. How do we now this is compatible with our socket 1155.
Well lets brake down the name.

Intel Core = Brand

I5 = Modifier

2 = Generation

500 = SKU

K = Letter suffix

 To see all the different processors I would advise you to have a look here: http://ark.intel.com/Default.aspx