Ivy Bridge is a 2012 CPU microarchitecture developed by Intel, and is used for third generation Core and Xeon v2-branded processors. As a 22 nm die shrink of its 32 nm predecessor, Sandy Bridge, it is the first Intel product to feature FinFET transistors. Ivy Bridge is the tick in the company's tick–tock model. Ivy Bridge is manufactured mainly as multi-core processors, with number of cores ranging from 1 to up to 15.

Ivy Bridge processors are backward compatible with the Sandy Bridge platform, but may require a firmware (BIOS) update depending on motherboard vendor. In 2011, Intel released the 7-series Panther Point chipsets with integrated USB 3.0 and SATA 3.0 to complement Ivy Bridge.

Volume production of Ivy Bridge chips began in the third quarter of 2011. Quad-core and dual-core-mobile models launched on April 29, 2012 and May 31, 2012 respectively. Core i3 desktop processors, as well as the first 22 nm Pentium, were announced and available the first week of September 2012.

Ivy Bridge is the last Intel platform on which Windows older than Windows 7 and Windows Server older than Windows Server 2008 R2 are officially supported by Microsoft. It is also the earliest Intel microarchitecture to officially support Windows 10 64-bit (NT 10.0).

Even after the release of the Haswell microarchitecture in June 2013, the Ivy Bridge microarchitecture continued to be produced with new models introduced up until March 2014, and were discontinued in June 2015 for desktop and mobile units and January 2016 for server and workstation units.

Overview The Ivy Bridge CPU microarchitecture is a shrink from Sandy Bridge and remains largely unchanged. Like its predecessor, Sandy Bridge, Ivy Bridge was also primarily developed by Intel's Israel branch, located in Haifa, Israel. Notable improvements include:

A new 22 nm Tri-gate transistor ("3-D") technology offers as much as a 50% reduction to power consumption at the same performance level as compared to 2-D planar transistors on Intel's 32 nm process. A new pseudorandom number generator and the RDRAND instruction, codenamed Bull Mountain.

Features Changes over Sandy Bridge include:

CPU F16C (16-bit floating-point conversion instructions) extension RDRAND instruction (Intel Secure Key) Max CPU multiplier of 63 (versus 57 for Sandy Bridge) Configurable TDP (cTDP) for mobile processors A 14- to 19-stage instruction pipeline, depending on the micro-operation cache hit or miss Supervisor Mode Execution Prevention CPUID Faulting support

{| class="wikitable" style="text-align: center" |+ |- ! colspan="2" | Cache ! colspan="3" | Page Size |- ! Name ! Level ! 4KB ! 2MB ! 1GB |- | DTLB | 1st | 64 | 32 | 4 |- | ITLB | 1st | 128 | 8 / logical core | none |- | STLB | 2nd | 512 | none | none

GPU The built-in GPU has 6 or 16 execution units (EUs), compared to Sandy Bridge's 6 or 12. Intel HD Graphics with DirectX 11, OpenGL 4.0, and OpenCL 1.2 support on Windows. On Linux, OpenGL 4.2 is supported since Mesa 17.1. Support for up to three displays (with some limitations: with chipset of 7-series and using two of them with DisplayPort or eDP) Multiple 4K displays video playback Intel Quick Sync Video version 2

IO RAM support up to 2800MT/s in 200 MHz increments DDR3L for mobile CPUs PCI Express 3.0 support (omitted on Core i3, Pentium, and ultra-low-voltage [ULV] processors)

Benchmark comparisons Compared to its predecessor, Sandy Bridge: 3% to 6% increase in instructions per clock 25% to 68% increase in integrated GPU performance

Thermal performance issues Ivy Bridge's temperatures are reportedly 10°C higher compared to Sandy Bridge when a CPU is overclocked, even at default voltage setting. Impress PC Watch, a Japanese website, performed experiments that confirmed earlier speculations that this is because Intel used a poor quality (and perhaps lower cost) thermal interface material (thermal paste, or "TIM") between the chip and the heat spreader, instead of the fluxless solder of previous generations. The mobile Ivy Bridge processors are not affected by this issue because they do not use a heat spreader between the chip and cooling system. Socket 2011 Ivy Bridge processors continue to use the solder.

Enthusiast reports describe the TIM used by Intel as low-quality, and not up to par for a "premium" CPU, with some speculation that this is by design to encourage sales of prior processors. Further analyses caution that the processor can be damaged or void its warranty if home users attempt to remedy the matter. The TIM has much lower thermal conductivity, causing heat to trap on the die. Experiments with replacing this TIM with a higher-quality one or other heat removal methods showed a substantial temperature drop, and improvements to the increased voltages and overclocking sustainable by Ivy Bridge chips.

Intel claims that the smaller die of Ivy Bridge and the related increase in thermal density is expected to result in higher temperatures when the CPU is overclocked; Intel also stated that this is as expected and will likely not improve in future revisions.

Models and steppings All Ivy Bridge processors with one, two, or four cores report the same CPUID model 0x000306A9, and are built in four different configurations differing in the number of cores, L3 cache and GPU execution units.

Die code name CPUID Stepping Die size Die dimensions Transistors Cores GPU EUs L3 cache Sockets Ivy Bridge-M-2 0x000306A9 P0 94 mm2 7.656 × 12.223 mm ≈634 million 2 6 3MB LGA 1155,Socket G2,BGA-1224,BGA-1023,BGA-1284 Ivy Bridge-H-2 L1 118 mm2 8.141 × 14.505 mm ≈830 million 16 4 MB Ivy Bridge-HM-4 N0 133 mm2 7.656 × 17.349 mm ≈1008 million 4 6 6 MB Ivy Bridge-HE-4 E1 160 mm2 8.141 × 19.361 mm ≈1400 million 16 8MB

Ivy Bridge–based Xeon processors

Intel Ivy Bridge–based Xeon microprocessors (also known as Ivy Bridge-E) is the follow-up to Sandy Bridge-E, using the same CPU core as the Ivy Bridge processor, but in LGA 2011, LGA 1356 and LGA 2011-1 packages for workstations and servers.

Additional high-end server processors based on the Ivy Bridge architecture, code named Ivytown, were announced September 10, 2013 at the Intel Developer Forum, after the usual one year interval between consumer and server product releases.

The Ivy Bridge-EP processor line announced in September 2013 has up to 12 cores and 30 MB third level cache, with rumors of Ivy Bridge-EX up to 15 cores and an increased third level cache of up to 37.5 MB, (citing an original post by Hassan Mujtaba on the same website) although an early leaked lineup of Ivy Bridge-E included processors with a maximum of 6 cores.

Both Core-i7 and Xeon versions are produced: the Xeon versions marketed as Xeon E5-1400 v2 act as drop-in replacements for the existing Sandy Bridge-EN based Xeon E5, Xeon E5-2600 V2 versions act as drop-in replacements for the existing Sandy Bridge-EP based Xeon E5, while Core-i7 versions designated i7-4820K, i7-4930K and i7-4960X were released on September 10, 2013, remaining compatible with the X79 and LGA 2011 hardware.

For the intermediate LGA 1356 socket, Intel launched the Xeon E5-2400 v2 (codenamed Ivy Bridge-EN) series in January 2014. These have up to 10 cores.

A new Ivy Bridge-EX line marketed as Xeon E7 v2 had no corresponding predecessor using the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture but instead followed the older Westmere-EX processors.

List of Ivy Bridge processors Processors featuring Intel's HD 4000 graphics (or HD P4000 for Xeon) are set in bold. Other processors feature HD 2500 graphics or HD Graphics unless indicated by N/A.

Desktop processors List of announced desktop processors, as follows:

Processorbrandingand model Cores(threads) CPU clock rate GPU clock rate L3cache TDP Releasedate Releaseprice(USD) Motherboard Normal Turbo Normal Turbo Socket Interface Memory Core i7Extreme 4960X 6 (12) 3.6 GHz 4.0 GHz rowspan=3 colspan=2 15 MB 130 W 2013-09-10 $999 LGA2011 DMI 2.0PCIe 3.0 Up to quadchannelDDR3-1866 Core i7 4930K 3.4 GHz 3.9 GHz 12 MB $5834820K 4 (8) 3.7 GHz 10 MB $323 3770K 3.5 GHz 650 MHz 1150 MHz 8 MB 77 W 2012-04-23 $332 LGA1155 Up to dualchannelDDR3-1600 3770 3.4 GHz $294 3770S 3.1 GHz 65 W 3770T 2.5 GHz 3.7 GHz 45 W Core i5 3570K 4 (4) 3.4 GHz 3.8 GHz 6 MB 77 W $225 3570 2012-05-31 $205 3570S 3.1 GHz 65 W 3570T 2.3 GHz 3.3 GHz 45 W 3550 3.3 GHz 3.7 GHz 77 W 2012-04-23 3550S 3.0 GHz 65 W 3475S 2.9 GHz 3.6 GHz 1050 MHz 2012-05-31 $201 3470 3.2 GHz 77 W $184 3470S 2.9 GHz 65 W3470T 2 (4) 3 MB 35 W3450 4 (4) 3.1 GHz 3.5 GHz 6 MB 77 W 2012-04-23 3450S 2.8 GHz 65 W 3350P 3.1 GHz 3.3 GHz colspan="2" 69 W 2012-09-03 $177 3340 650 MHz 1050 MHz 77 W 2013-09-01 $182 3340S 2.8 GHz 65 W 3335S 2.7 GHz 3.2 GHz 2012-09-03 $194 3330S $177 3330 3.0 GHz 77 W $182 Core i3 3250 2 (4) 3.5 GHz rowspan="24" 3 MB 55 W 2013-06-09 $138 DMI 2.0PCIe 2.0 3245 3.4 GHz $134 3240 2012-09-03 $138 3225 3.3 GHz $134 3220 $117 3210 3.2 GHz 2013-01-20 3250T 3.0 GHz 35 W 2013-06-09 $138 3240T 2.9 GHz 2012-09-03 3220T 2.8 GHz $117 PentiumG2140 2 (2) 3.3 GHz 55 W 2013-06-09 $86 G2130 3.2 GHz 2013-01-20 G2120 3.1 GHz 2012-09-03 G2120T 2.7 GHz 35 W 2013-06-09 $75 G2100T 2.6 GHz 2012-09-03 G2030 3.0 GHz 55 W 2013-06-09 $64 Dual channelDDR3-1333 G2020 2.9 GHz 2013-01-20 G2010 2.8 GHz G2030T 2.6 GHz 35 W 2013-06-09 G2020T 2.5 GHz 2013-01-20 CeleronG1630 2.8 GHz 2 MB 55 W 2013-09-01 $52 G1620 2.7 GHz 2013-01-20 G1610 2.6 GHz $42 G1620T 2.4 GHz 35 W 2013-09-01 G1610T 2.3 GHz 2013-01-20 <li>Requires a compatible motherboard with 7 series chipsets.

Suffixes to denote: KUnlocked (adjustable CPU multiplier up to 63 times) SPerformance-optimized lifestyle (low power with 65 W TDP) TPower-optimized lifestyle (ultra-low power consumption with 35–45 W TDP) PNo on-die video chipset XExtreme performance (adjustable CPU ratio with no ratio limit)

Server processors

Processorbranding and model Cores(threads) CPU clock rate GPU clock rate L3cache TDP Releasedate Price(USD) Motherboard Normal Turbo Normal Turbo Socket Interface Memory