As Intel's tick-tock CPU development Juggernaut rolls on, things seem very much on track, looking into the near future. Intel will launch its new "Ivy Bridge" 3rd Generation Core processor family in early-April 2012, which is a miniaturization of what is essentially the "Sandy Bridge" to the new 22 nm process, with IPC and instruction-set improvements, along with a faster graphics controller. The new process will also up clock speeds and overclocking headroom for chips that support it. What's more interesting, though, is that the architecture that succeeds Ivy Bridge, codenamed "Haswell", will be less than an year away in April...well almost.

A roadmap slide sourced by DonanimHaber pins the launch of Haswell to March-June, 2013. Haswell is a brand new CPU architecture that will succeed Ivy Bridge. According to the conventional idea of Intel's tick-tock CPU development strategy, it will be built on the 22 nm fab process, which will have gained some maturity by then. Intel follows a "tick-tock" product development model. Every year, Intel's product lineup sees either of the two. A "tock" brings in a new x86 architecture, a "tick" miniaturizes it to a newer silicon fabrication process. Earlier reports indicated that Haswell Core processors will be based on a newer socket, the LGA1150, and hence it will not be compatible with LGA1155 platforms.