We are living in the era of Ivy Bridge processors. These 22nm parts in quad and dual variants are slowly getting to desktop and notebooks around the world and Intel have some impressive plans for a relatively quick transition to 22nm.

In the desktop market Sandy Bridge holds some 70 percent of the market but already in first half of 2012 that ends with this month it hopes that 5+ percent of desktop market will be Ivy Bridge based. Already in the second half of 2012 Intel plans Ivy Bridge will end up with about 30 percent of the desktop market, blowing away both Sandy Bridge and ancient Yorkfield and Wolfdale 45nm Core 2 Quad and Duo processors.

The expansion continues in 1H 2013 where Ivy Bridge should account for close to 50 percent of the market and Sandy Bridge drops to below 40 percent of market. In this same period Intel plans to launch socket LGA1150 processor codenamed Haswell that should have an even faster transition schedule than Ivy Bridge.

Already in 1H 2012 (January to June 2013) Intel plans that almost 10 percent of all processors will end up based on Haswell core. Compared to Ivy Bridge that had some 5 percent of the market in 1H 2012, this looks like much faster start, but at the same time it could mean that delay of the dual core Ivy Bridge might be responsible for this inequality.

Haswell means a new socket, new motherboards and new chipsets but this has been a practice that Intel changes its socket every second year. As we said, the new socket is LGA1150 and is not compatible with current ones.