It looks like Intel is on the right track with its tick – tock strategy. Ivy Bridge, the first 22nm architecture that is slightly improved Sandy Bridge die shrunk from 32nm to 22nm, is about to starts its yearlong dominance in early April.

Haswell is a new 22nm architecture and its CPUs will get even faster, and instead of sticking with quad-cores, it can also have six cores, as well as sub-95W TPDs, most likely even less than that for many SKUs.

Graphics on Haswell should end up tremendously faster. It will get 20 to 40 percent performance boost compared Sandy Bridge Core I 2000 second generation CPUs. On top of that you can expect up to 50 percent overall performance increase in Haswell 22nm, but frankly 50 percent looks like the best case scenario.

This will put even more pressure on AMD’s Fusion processors including Trinity, but AMD still has significantly better graphics and might offer superior value for money with its APUs. Nvidia will simply rely on the Optimus tandem for notebooks and faster high end graphics cards on the desktop side.

Either way, in case Intel doesn’t get things messed with its second generation 22nm processor, they are off for a nice ride. As long as they are not playing video of an actual game demo, Intel Ivy Bridge can run Formula 1 game on medium quality settings and 1366x768, the average resolution of a mainstream notebook, and imagine that it can get some 50 percent better than that.