Intel’s Ivy Bridge processor, the upcoming "tick" in Intel’s clock-esque world domination strategy, has yet to be released and we are already getting rumors and leaked information coming in about the "tock" that will be Ivy Bridge’s successor in the 22nm Haswell processors (as part of the Shark Bay platform). Ivy Bridge processors will bring incremental performance improvements and lower power usage on the same 1155 socket that Sandy Bridge employs.

Haswell; however, will move to (yet another) socket LGA 1150 on the desktop, and will bring incremental improvements over Ivy Bridge. Improvements include much faster integrated processor graphics and the AVX2 instruction set. Unfortunately, Intel will be returning to an increased TDP (thermal design power) with Haswell compared to the lower TDP from Sandy Bridge to Ivy Bridge.

According to Domain Haber, who claims to have gotten their hands on a leaked road map, Intel will be launching Ivy Bridge through the end of this year, and then will debut their Haswell processors in the first half of 2013. The alleged road map can be seen below.

What I found interesting about the road map is that there is no mention of an Ivy Bridge-E or Haswell-E processor. Instead, the current Sandy Bridge-E chips are shown occupying the high end and enthusiast segment through at least the first half of 2013 and the launch of Haswell. Whether enthusiasts will continue to choose the Sandy Bridge-E processors for that long will remain to be seen, however. Also strange is that, according to VR-Zone, Intel will have three tiers of integrated graphics performance with GT1, GT2, and GT3. They will then place the fastest graphics core in the mobile chips and leave the slower graphics cores in the desktop chips. Discrete cards are not dead yet, it seems (unless you’re rocking an AMD APU of course).

Have you invested in a Sandy Bridge-E setup, or are you still holding onto an older chip to wait for the best performance upgrade for your money?  If you have bought into SB-E, do you think it’ll last you into 2013?