<p><span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: left; ">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).</span></p> <p><span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: left; ">Last year was a big one.&nbsp;</span>Sandy Bridge<span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: left; ">&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.</span></p> <p><span style="color: rgb(68, 68, 68); font-family: Arial, Helvetica, sans-serif; line-height: 19px; text-align: left; ">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.</span></p> <p><a target="_blank" href="http://www.anandtech.com/show/5626/ivy-bridge-preview-core-i7-3770k">Read more...</a></p>