Despite the fact that you probably won’t be able to buy a Ivy Bridge desktop or a motherboard based on Intel’s new 70-series chipset before April, many partners are working hard on motherboards to support Intel’s new platform.
 
A while ago we said that Ivy Bridge is pin compatible and will work in most 60-series motherboards, but for a full experience you will need to get the new board, e.g. one based on the H77 chipset. Intel’s partners are already playing and Ivy Bridge 22nm is the real thing, they have samples and they claim that in some cases it’s much faster than Sandy Bridge at the same clock.

The most impressive performance increase is graphics that rocks much faster than on Sandy Bridge. Intel is certainly getting much better when it comes to graphics and multimedia on its platforms.

Ivy Bridge boards, CPUs for both notebooks and desktops are expected in March / April time, and once again you will get better performance, better battery and overall better platform to dominate notebooks and most desktops in 2012.