22nm Ivy Bridge wafer glimpse

At Computex 2011, Mooly Eden, Intel’s vice president and general manager of the mobile platform division, showed the world the wafers of the next-generation 22nm Ivy Bridge processor, but did not release any specific information.

Mooly Eden just said Ivy Bridge will integrate more transistors, but this is basically a "nonsense." The number of transistors in the Sandy Bridge processor quad-core version is 995 million.

Of course, this is a 300mm diameter standard wafer. The approximate number can be found that there are up to 37 cores in the vertical direction and a maximum of 15 in the horizontal direction. The size of a single core is approximately 8.1 x 20 mm, which is 162 mm2. In contrast, the Sandy Bridge quad-core core size for the 32nm process is 216 square millimeters.

Obviously, what is shown here is the Ivy Bridge quad-core version, which integrates 16 graphics execution cores.

In fact, the photos of the Ivy Bridge core also revealed one, but I couldn't see any details and only vaguely saw that it was indeed a quad-core.

It is no secret that the 7 series chipsets of the Ivy Bridge platform natively support USB 3.0, but the same support for the Thunderbolt interface is mentioned for the first time. It seems that Intel's reluctance to natively support USB 3.0 is really waiting for its own Thunderbolt.