HoTWiReZ's DoMaiN

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<p>
I still remember hearing about Intel's tick-tock cadence and not having much faith that the company could pull it off. Granted Intel hasn't given us a new chip every 12 months on the dot, but more or less there's something new every year. Every year we either get a new architecture on an established process node (tock), or a derivative architecture on a new process node (tick). The table below summarizes what we've seen since Intel adopted the strategy:</p>
<table align="center" border="0" cellpadding="0" cellspacing="1" width="575">
<tbody>
<tr class="tgrey">
<td align="center" colspan="6">
Intel's Tick-Tock Cadence</td>
</tr>
<tr class="tlblue">
<td width="120">
Microarchitecture</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle" width="85">
Process Node</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle" width="85">
Tick or Tock</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle" width="85">
Release Year</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tlgrey">
Conroe/Merom</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
65nm</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
Tock</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
2006</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tlgrey">
Penryn</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
45nm</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
Tick</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
2007</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tlgrey">
Nehalem</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
45nm</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
Tock</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
2008</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tlgrey">
Westmere</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
32nm</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
Tick</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
2010</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tlgrey">
Sandy Bridge</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
32nm</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
Tock</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
2011</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tlgrey">
Ivy Bridge</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
22nm</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
Tick</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
2012</td>
</tr>
<tr>
<td class="tlgrey">
Haswell</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
22nm</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
Tock</td>
<td align="center" valign="middle">
2013</td>
</tr>
</tbody>
</table>
<p>
Last year was a big one.&nbsp;Sandy Bridge&nbsp;brought a Conroe-like increase in performance across the board thanks to a massive re-plumbing of Intel's out-of-order execution engine and other significant changes to the microarchitecture. If you remember Conroe (the first Core 2 architecture), what followed it was a relatively mild upgrade called Penryn that gave you a little bit in the way of performance and dropped power consumption at the same time.</p>
<p>
&nbsp;</p>
<p align="center">
</p>
<p>
Ivy Bridge, the follow-on to Sandy Bridge should be a tick but because of significant improvements on the GPU side Intel is calling it a tick+.&nbsp;We managed to get our hands on an early Ivy Bridge system and ran it through some tests to determine exactly how much of an improvement is coming our way in a couple of months.</p>
<p>
Read on!</p>

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Source: AnandTech
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