Intel is getting ready to bring out its latest 22nm Ivy Bridge series of processors sometimes around April 8, perhaps right on that date. It is expected that the multinational semiconductor chip maker will be releasing around 25 Ivy Bridge chips in this scheduled time period.

The 17 to be launched CPUs are desktop models and the rest of the 8 are meant to be used for notebook and ultrabook. The desktop part will be including quad-core Core i7-3770K, 3770, 3770S, 3770T, and Core i5-3570, 3550 and 3450 models, the prices of which will be extending from $184 to $332.

The Core i5-3470T is believed to be hitting the market in May with a price tag of $184. The desktop chipsets scheduled to be released on May 13 will be including Z77 for $48, H77 for $43, Z75 for $40, and B75 for $37, along with Q77 for $44 and Q75 for $40, sources informed.

Earlier it was rumored that the Ivy Bridge processors would be released sometimes in March 2012, as suggested by a tip from the motherboard manufacturers; however it doesn’t seem the same anymore. It is estimated that the chips will be improving the overall processing performance by 20% compared to Sandy Bridge CPUs. The overall graphics performance will also see an improvement by 30 to 60 percent as the internal GPU has been reworked and it now offers DirectX11 and OpenCL 1.1 support.

Ivy Bridge CPUs from Intel are going to get released by March 2012, as per an inside information from the motherboard manufacturer. And it is expected to be offering dual core and quad core parts along with multiple new chipsets in the initial product itself.

The TDP ratings for the latest 22nm dual core CPUs are found to be 35W and 55W where as the ratings for quad core pieces are found to be 45W, 65W and 77W by a noted electronics media. The new chipsets that are going to replace Z68 and P67 offerings are Z77 and Z75. The present H67 based boards will be replaced by H77 chipset and the business models will get Q77, Q75, and B75 chipsets which will be replacing Q67, Q65 and B65 based products.

From the processing side, the performance is expected to be improved up to 20% with Ivy Bridge compared to Sandy Bridge CPUs. The graphics performance is also expected to be improved to about 30 to 60 percent with the DirectX 11 and OpenCL 1.1 support of the worked out internal GPU.

The 22nm chip offers a support for 4K video resolution which will make your GPU along with the supporting monitor to run a video stream at about 4096 X 4096 pixels also known as 4K x 4K, a special feature that works pretty well because of the Multi Format Codec Engine or MFX offered by Ivy Bridge as claimed by Intel.

Paul Otellini, the CEO of Intel stated in a conference call held in the earlier part of this week that they had already started up working on Ivy Bridge and the chip was being improved for Q4 their special qualification for sale. This makes it likely that the company will be sending its samples for final testing to OEMs before taking to its public launch.

AMD has just come up with its first dual core Llano APUs. With the addition of these APUs namely A4-3300 and A4-3400, their line has got extended by more than five models which are available right now and have even got the price of the entry-level desktop reduced to mere $70. Both the chips use a Radeon HD 6410D GPU integrating it with 160 shaders and 1 MB L2 cache, maintaining a 65W TDP at the same time.

It is only their CPU and GPU frequencies on the basis of which you can differentiate between these chips. Checking out A4-3300, it’s found workable at 2.5GHz with its GPU clocked at 443 MHz, where as the CPU core of A4-3400 runs at 2.7 GHz and has a GPU frequency of 600 MHz.

While in its features, an integrated USB 3.0 controller, AMD Steady Video support in order to remove the jitters and shakes at the time of video watching, and AMD Dual Graphics that lets you pair the integrated GPU with a discrete Radeon HD 6000 Series graphics card for performance enhancement are expected. However, none of the A4 models support Turbo Core.

Both the chips are expected to be working well in all existing Socket-FM1 motherboards. The official prices declared for 1K quantities for A4- 3300 and 3400 happen to be $64 and $69, so the retail price at which they’ll be available by the later part of the month will be slightly higher.

AMD has not yet announced any release date for its forthcoming Bulldozer processors, it is reported that the company is kind of keen about talking about these CPUs at the Hot Chips 2011 Symposium, and this is where it will be publicly telling about the upcoming architecture with more added details.

As the conference program has informed, the presentation will be titled as “Perf Power-Efficient Bulldozer-Core X86-64 Server, WS & Desktop Procs” and is to be held next Friday, on August, 19.

But the sad part is that nothing else is yet known about what AMD is going to present during the conference.

Bulldozer is the next-generation high performance CPU architecture from AMD that it designed from the ground up especially to curb some of the repetitions that occur in the case of the traditional multi-core designs.

Because of this architecture, the chip goes for a modular construction and each of the module comprises of two floating point units of 128-bit FMA, which have the ability of being combined into one 256-bit FPU, two integer cores each of which has 4 pipelines, and about 2048 KB of L2 cache.

Similar to the 8MB of L3 cache, it will also have the Level 2 memory shared between the modules.

Turbo Core technology of AMD will be supported by all the consumer chips. They’ll also have the support for native DDR3-1866 memory. It will also be offering one or more Hyper Transport 3.1 links. However, a quad-channel memory controller will be offered by the Opteron 6200 series.

Server processors will be available in two product types, namely Valencia and Interlagos. Out of which the first one will be offering 6 or 8 core design whereas the second one may be featuring 12 or 16 processing cores.

Till now, only this much is know that the initial Opteron server processor lineup form AMD will be including no less than 4 processors, 2 of which will be featuring 16 cores, and the next one will be coming up with 12 computing cores, and the final one will be an 8-core chip.

The speed of these will be between 2.1 and 2.8 GHz, and at the same time the maximum Turbo Core frequencies can go as high as 3.9 GHz which will surely depend on the chip.

Even though the actual launch date of the first Bulldozer processors is yet to be known, but if you are to believe the rumors, it may be out sometimes in September or October of 2011.