Known to be missing out on both CES 2012 and CeBIT 2012, Intel's next-generation processor platform, codenamed Ivy Bridge, is now claimed to be rolling out on April 8th. Of course, April 8th is a Sunday so it's probable that the actual launch, accompanied by a long press release and a flurry of reviews, will be scheduled for Monday, the 9th of April.

According to Digitimes' Taiwanese sources, the first Ivy Bridge wave will include no less than 25 processors (17 desktop models and 8 notebook/ultrabook chips) and 8 chipsets (Z77, H77, Z75 and B75 for desktops, HM77, UM77, HM76 and HM75 for mobile PCs). More Ivy Bridge products, including the Core i5-3470T CPU and the Q77, Q75, QS77 and QM77 chipsets, are said to become available in May.

Previous preliminary reports have suggested that the forthcoming Ivy Bridge CPUs will have single threaded performance on par with the existing Sandy Bridge CPUs and will mainly deliver improvements to power consumption and integrated graphics - nothing for PC enthusiasts to get excited about. However, in leaked documents sent to partners, Intel have now revealed official performance figures for IB and they look rather good. They've produced a raft of benchmarks, which reveal improvements such as 56% in ArcSoft Media Expresso, 25% in Excel 2010 and a 199% gain in the 3D Mark Vantage GPU benchmark. Unfortunately, they haven't released any benchmarks based on high performance 3D games, but it's probably safe to say that they will be similarly improved. Now, on to the benchmarks, which compare their new 3.4 GHz i7-3770 (4 cores + HT) with the current 3.4 GHz i7-2600, also with 4 cores + HT: