The first announcements related to the Ivy Bridge chip of Intel (NASDAQ:INTC) are expected to be made by April 23, reports have recently revealed. Earlier reports have suggested that the Ivy Bridge chip announcements may be made from April 23 up to April 29 however recent reports have revealed that Intel intends to make the initial rollout on April 23.
The Ivy Bridge chip, the successor to the Intel Sandy bridge processor, is considered as the initial offering in the next series of Intel mainstream chips that focuses on multimedia and graphics processing. It has reduced the manufacturing process to 22 nanometers from the 32nm.
The graphics performance of the Ivy Bridge chip in comparison to the previous designs of Intel was shown through a number of benchmarks that were conducted recently. The upcoming chip uses the latest 3D transistors, which increases witching speed by 37 percent according to Intel even as it uses around half of the power used by 2D transistors.
The upcoming chip is also the first ones to offer support for USB 3.0. Reports have emerged that the upcoming models of the MacBook will feature the Ivy Bridge chips once they enter the market.
A number of other manufacturers will also release their own devices that may use the Ivy Bridge chip with a good number of these upcoming devices anticipated to be slim. Although numerous high performance systems are anticipated to be thin, they normally use a different graphics chip from other manufacturers like Nvidia (NASDAQ:NVDA).
The release of devices using the Ivy Bridge chip will likely be spread out and quad-core chips may be released before the power-efficient processors.
Once the Ivy Bridge chip is released, the prices of older devices using the Sandy Bridge chip are expected to o down. According to Kirk Skaugen, the general manager of Intel, the price tags of ultrabooks are expected to go down to around $699.
