Ivy Bridge-E A Native 6 Core, Not Cut Down 8 Core Like Sandy Bridge-E

According to some information from VR-Zone Intel’s Ivy Bridge-E platform will be quite different to Sandy Bridge-E. The Ivy Bridge-E CPUs will be native 6 core dies as opposed to cut down 8 core dies like the Sandy Bridge-E CPUs were. While this may seem like a minor or insignificant change, it is not. It does indeed feature the same 15MB of cache and same six cores as Sandy Bridge-E but the reduced die size should improve the CPU in a couple of ways. Firstly it should consume less power, as we have already seen from early reviews, and secondly, it should give more overclocking headroom both on the memory controller and on the CPU itself

Unlike the current Ivy Bridge chips the Ivy Bridge-E chips have no integrated graphics and (should) come with a soldered heatspreader, not the crappy thermal paste Intel uses in Ivy Bridge and Haswell Core series processors. These two things mean overclocking headroom will be greatly improved. Graphics enthusiasts will also be pleased with the true PCIe generation 3.0 certification compared to the hybrid 2.0/3.0 certification we saw on the current Sandy Bridge-E CPUs. Finally, Intel is also reported to have successfully matured the 22nm FinFET process to solve some leakage problems seen on other 22nm CPUs that can hinder performance slightly.

Image courtesy of VR-Zone