Ivy Bridge delay til June?

I've been seeing a lot of articles about this. Anyone can verify? Assuming this is true will it still be worth the wait? April was so close now June is another 2 months on top of that

 

Ivy Bridge (IVB) what? IVB Bridge Mobile CPU? IVB Desktop CPU? IVB Dual Core, IVB Quad Core?

Rumors are flying. I'd wait a little bit to see if more information comes out. But in case you want to get up to speed, start here - http://forum.notebookreview.com/har...eed-know-when-i-get-laptop-2.html#post8326729

Summary of rumors:

• http://www.pcworld.com/article/2501..._2012_looking_dark_for_notebook_industry.html
• http://www.digitimes.com/news/a20120215PD215.html
• http://www.tweaktown.com/news/22691...y_bridge_launch_from_april_to_june/index.html
• http://vr-zone.com/articles/intel-is-only-delaying-dual-core-mobile-ivy-bridge-cpus/14933.html
• http://hothardware.com/News/Intel-Sets-the-Record-Straight-on-Ivy-Bridge-Delay-Rumors/

 

Actually only the mobile Dual core CPUs only. Quads are still on track.

 

And this is why everyone who flamed ultrabook manufacturers "for not waiting a couple months for Ivy Bridge" was being shortsighted with their flames...

 

It would not surprise me. Intel has no reason to release Ivy Bridge.

AMD does not compete with Intel on high-end performance or power consumption on either desktop or laptop platforms. The only area where AMD competes with Intel is bang-for-your-buck on low to mid-end desktop processors.

The only competition that Intel has for Ivy Bridge is its own Sandy Bridge platform. And Intel made a *TON* of money in 2011 with Sandy Bridge ($43.6b revenue, $11.7b net income, 40% of sales came from Sandy Bridge). The only thing that releasing Ivy Bridge would do is cannibalize sales of Sandy Bridge.

 

Quads are on track for both mobile and desktop?

 

That's correct

 

AMD competes in power consumption in mobile platform. 1080p, A8-3510MX, 6750m, 8GB DDR3 1600 1.5V, consumes < 12W with wi-fi on and half screen brightness. E-350 consumes < 7W with wi-fi on and half screen brightness.

As far as performance, there's no question Intel is the clear winner. But with AMD Trinity on the way Intel better be worried on the mobile platform. Not only is CPU performance improved, but IGP performance is greatly improved. The 25W APU's will perform on par with current gen Llano 45W APU's, and 17W similar to the 35W.

 

But how many laptops have the AMD A8 Llano APU that you mentioned? Because there are literally hundreds of laptops with Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs.

As for Trinity... I was not too impressed with Bulldozer, despite the similar level of hype around that. I believe that the AMD Trinity parts (future product) will either beat or come close to beating current-gen Sandy Bridge parts in terms of performance. But beyond that, AMD is out of trying to chase high performance.

Their CEO came out a few weeks ago and made an announcement with two key points. First, at the high end of performance, it takes 20% increase in engineering costs to get a 5% increase in performance. Second, he announced the AMD strategy of modularizing their chip designs, specifically to allow technology partners to use AMD technology for SOC packages.

It is not hard to read between the lines... AMD is forfeitting the high performance race with Intel, and instead focusing on the high growth market of ARM-based SOCs.

 

Right. But AMD is pushing the right direction IMHO. They have better low power performance when you look at the package of CPU + IGP. I know Trinity is all speculation at the moment, but early first hand accounts validate what AMD has been touting. From what I've seen with the Llano, I'm thoroughly impressed. And based on early reports, they're pushing clock speeds much higher, more in line with how they can actually perform. Most Llano CPU's can easily clock 30% higher at same voltage, and push the voltage higher, you can achieve 60%+ with reasonable temperatures.

For those who don't need top speed CPU performance, the AMD is a great option with excellent IGP performance with more than adequate CPU.

In any case, I'm anxiously awaiting Ivy Bridge too. I plan on making a purchase end of this summer, and will carefully weigh Ivy Bridge vs Trinity.

 

Very True.

However, Intel needs Ivy Bridge to meet the demand of its manufacturer customers for a viable platform to compete with the Macbook Air/ Ultrabook category. Ivy Bridge will also power some higher end tablet solutions too in the near future. (Which even the Macbook Air is Sandy Bridge.. funny enough, guess the rest of the platform is proprietary?)

In this case, its not so much "Same Ol'e Same Ol'e" but the need to meet customer demands.

 

The one area where I see AMD being able to push a performance advantage is if hybrid computing takes off and becomes mainstream.

The idea of hybrid computing is to offload floating-point operations to the GPU, which handles those types of calculations much more efficiently than the CPU. This can yield a pretty decent performance gain in areas that do scalable parallel floating point calculations, like applying a Photoshop image filter or doing real-time video encoding.

However, this is still pretty far off from being mainstream (PC Perspective estimates at least 2 years). It was only recently shown as a proof-of-concept as part of a graduate project from North Carolina State University. It requires use of a GP-GPU API, which does not have a common standard (split between CUDA and OpenCL). It assumes that the computer has a GPU powerful enough to outperform a CPU in these types of calculations. And it requires software engineers to write software that specifically takes advantage of this type of hybrid CPU / GPU platform.

Right now, I think that Intel has a slight advantage in the hybrid computing field, because they offer QuickSync technology through Virtu Technologies as a value-add for desktop computers running on Z68 chipsets. But that implementation is so mature, that AMD could easily come in and offer a better solution using their APU platforms and take the lead.

If that does indeed happen, and AMD makes a push for hybrid computing, then that is where I can see them overtaking Intel for performance. But in the meantime, AMD lags far behind Intel in terms of real-world performance, research & engineering pipeline, manufacturing process, and company resources. I don't think AMD is able to beat Intel through engineering or manufacturing... they will have to change how computing power is used in order to be competitive at the high-end of performance.

 

More rumors of the same news regarding IVB duo-core vs. quad core mobile CPUs - Intel Sets the Record Straight on Ivy Bridge Delay Rumors - HotHardware