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Ivy Bridge-E to be compatible with Sandy Bridge-E socket

A slide leaked on the forums at Chinese site XFastest indicates that Ivy Bridge Extreme processors will be socket and chipset compatible with Sandy Bridge-E. It shows that IB-E processors will work in current X79 Express motherboards. This is good news for a lot of potential purchasers, as it means a system bought now will not cost as much to upgrade in 12 months.

It was also revealed that IB-E is expected to be released in Q4 2012. Using the same 22nm technology that Ivy Bridge processor will be built on, the processor will have room for more features and cores than SB-E, and may have 10 cores, as well as other new features.

It is also likely that there will be a significant performance increase over SB-E, as well as greater overclcocking potential and lower power consumption. SB-E has a TDP of 130W, so any improvement on this will be good.

Additionally, it was revealed that the third processor in the Sandy Bridge Extreme line-up, the less extreme i7-3820, is expected to be available in February 2012. The first Ivy Bridge processors are still expected to be available around March-April 2012, and the enthusiast version will have a TDP of 77W, 20% less than an equivalent Sandy Bridge processor. Other variants will have a TDP ranging from 35W to 65W. If this reduced power consumption is scaled up to IB-E, we could be seeing a TDP as low as 105W for high-end IB-E processors.