Intel pushes Ivy Bridge out a little further

Intel is set to delay the launch of its next-gen processor, Ivy Bridge. While some of Intel's new chips will still surface in products this April, mass Ivy Bridge release will not happen until much later in 2012, DigiTimes reports. Poor sales of current-gen Sandy Bridge machines is apparently to blame, although plans may have …

[annodomini2]

Pure marketing ploy

"Poor sales of current-gen Sandy Bridge machines is apparently to blame"

I call BS!

More like: "Ultrabooks haven't taken off as expected, so we'll keep 'Ivy Bridge' Ultrabook only for 6 Months to improve sales!"

[Richard Crossley]

Re: Pure marketing ploy

and my money stays in my bank account until they're released.

[Ammaross Danan]

Re: Re: Pure marketing ploy

"...while Intel is also troubled by its Sandy Bridge processor inventory, the CPU giant plans to delay mass shipments of the new processors to minimize the impact"

So, because their CPUs are still priced high (just shy of launch prices, due to no real competition from AMD), no one buys their chip stocks en masse, so rather than slash the price a bit to shift them, they'll just sit on their current prices until their stockpile goes down.

Come on AMD! This is what competition is supposed to prevent!

[Anonymous Coward]

"Poor sales of current-gen Sandy Bridge machines is apparently to blame"

So what, because people have been holding off buying a Sandy Bridge machine when they know Ivy Bridge is right around the corner, the solution is... to make them wait a bit longer? Oh well, suppose it'll give nvidia some time to bring out something to rival the 7970, and for RAM and disk prices to drop a bit more...

[JC_]

Only a 'Tick'

Ivy Bridge is only a tick (die-shrink) not a new architecture (tock), so while it'll be slightly faster and use somewhat less power, it's not a massive change, certainly nothing compared to the step up that Sandy Bridge represented.

A good deal on a Sandy Bridge laptop today is still gonna be a good deal in six months. Sandy Bridge is plenty fast enough for 99% what people do now.

[Ammaross Danan]

Re: Only a 'Tick'

There's more than just a die shrink in Ivy Bridge. The tri-gate transistors and the bump in integrated graphics performance just to name two. Need more? Extra PCIe lanes, PCIe 3.0 and native support for USB3. The die shrink and tri-gate transistors alone allows them to drop the core voltage fairly significantly, thus saving power.

My money is sitting until Ivy Bridge comes out. I doubt AMD will come up with a suitable competitor by then (not holding my breath with Piledriver), which is why Intel can sit on their stockpile rather than slash prices a bit to shift it.

[Pete Spicer]

I suspect this will also further delay the Mac Pro from being refreshed for a while too, and for the same reason it's already been 18 months since the last refresh... (Mind you, Apple may also be waiting on nVidia to do something in that department too...)

[andybird123]

it's funny because...

all the hardware forums are advising people to not buy sandybridge and wait for ivy... thus causing more delays to the sale of ivybridge

Brilliant!

Beer because it's Friday

[asdf]

Intel fail

Yes Intel there is a market for decent performance chips that use less than 2 watts but guess what you have never been a player in it and you never will be.

[asdf]

Re: Intel fail

Was meant more for their vaporware Tablet chips instead of Ultrabooks but Intel pretty consistently fails on the low end of the power usage spectrum.

[rav]

hmmm...delay? How about it doesn't work.

AMD doesn't have those problems with Llano and Bobcat. Hmm....How about Intel graphics suck and Intel on-die graphics really suck?

Whoops there goes market share right to AMD!