Much of the Intel Developer Forum's first day on Tuesday was spent talking about Ivy Bridge, Intel's next generation CPU built on the upcoming 22nm tri-gate process technology. Normally, Ivy Bridge would be the "tick" in Intel's "tick-tock" model of processor product development. The "tick" refers to moving to a new, higher density process technology. When Intel does that, the first CPU product it builds on the new manufacturing process, is usually a tweaked and enhanced version of an existing CPU architecture. The "tock" is when Intel, now comfortable with a new process, designs a new architecture, then builds it on the now familiar process.

On the x86 CPU side, Intel pretty much did just that with Ivy Bridge. There will be some performance improvements over the existing Sandy Bridge architecture, but those will be incremental. Power efficiency is likely to be substantially better, however.

However, the GPU side is more like a "tock." The graphics core built into Ivy Bridge will be substantially improved over the current Intel HD Graphics in Sandy Bridge. It will be fully DirectX 11 compliant, to the point of being able to run compute shaders written for DirectCompute entirely on the shaders built into the Ivy Bridge GPU.

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