Ivy Bridge

Kirk Skaugen, corporate vice president and general manager of Intel’s PC Client Group, said there are more than 300 mobile products and 270 desktops powered by Ivy Bridge processors that will hit the market.

Intel executives expect the Ivy Bridge ramp to be the fastest in company history. Intel has outfitted three manufacturing fabs to build the chips, and the company is building a fourth one that will go online later this year. There will be 50 percent more supply than what Intel had early in the product cycle for Sandy Bridge, and company officials expect Ivy Bridge to account for half of all chip shipments by the fall.

The Tri-Gate transistor architecture, which Intel engineers had been working on for 10 years before it was announced in 2011, will drive down the power consumption of the processor and give Intel a key technology as it looks to gain traction in the smartphone and tablet markets dominated by chips designed by ARM and made by the likes of Qualcomm, Samsung Electronics and Texas Instruments.

The Tri-Gate architecture essentially moves away from the flat “planar” circuitry of previous designs to a three-dimensional structure that enables Intel to offer better performance and power efficiency. This illustration compares the 32nm transistor on the left with the 22nm Tri-Gate architecture. The planar transistor in the current (represented by the yellow dots) flows in a plane underneath the gate. In a Tri-Gate transistor, the current flows on three sides of a vertical fin.

The first Ivy Bridge chips are targeted at high-end desktop PCs, including the increasingly popular all-in-one systems. In all, HP initially is releasing six new PCs powered by Ivy Bridge processors.

Lenovo, the world’s second-largest PC maker, also is coming out with its own Ivy Bridge-powered all-in-one system, the Lenovo A720.

Asus, the fifth-largest PC maker in the world, also is supporting Ivy Bridge with an all-in-one system.

Asus also is promoting a laptop—the N65—that officials said will run on Ivy Bridge processors.

The company is now offering Intel 3rd-Generation Core processers in several of its gaming systems, including Fang III Viper, Cobra and Zeus Thunder.

MSI’s GT70 laptop also will be powered by upcoming Ivy Bridge processors.