Intel Ivy bridge

The Ivy bridge has finally arrived. It is the tick in the intel roadmap which was preceded by the oh-so successful sandybridge architecture.Ivy bridge is the 22nm die shrink of the sandybridge than an architecture change. So basically what you get is better thermal efficiency and lower power consumption . Performance is also better than their sandybridge counterparts . It features a new and improved onboard graphics capable of providing much better performance than the previous generation chips. The onboard DX11 supported hd4000 graphics is now capable of competing with the likes of AMD's fusion line up . Intel has launched a total of 10 desktop and 7 mobile processors in total of which the core i7 3770k tops the charts. As you would have guessed its a fully unlocked quad core processor with hyperthreading. Intel also launched tow more variants of the processor , S which stands for slightly better power consumption and lower clock speeds and T which stands for even lower power consumption for optimum energy savings. The new cpus have excellent overclocking capabilities with most of the reviewers achieving around 5GHz on air cooling. But let me remind you that this comes at the cost of extremely high temperatures hovering around the 90 degree mark. Let me tell something about the platform also. The Z77 platform is the performance and enthusiast oriented platform designed for the ivy bridge chips. Its somewhat similar to the Z68's we had last year . The major difference is the PCIe 3.0 support and native USB3.0 support. But other than that the new platform does not bring anything new to the table . So is ivy bridge an excellent buy ? Yes and no. Yes , if you are still on the 775 and the 1355 platform or you need to jump the boat from AMD . No, if you already own a sandybridge processor because according to reports their is only a slight performance difference and PCIe 3.0 is not really going to bother you yet. So that's it, Intel has delivered another great processor with the launch of ivy. It leaves me thinking, where are you AMD ? 

Here is a glimpse of the processors.