Ivy Bridge Questions...(NOT about when/if the MBP gets them)

most consumers will never notice a difference in daily overall performance

 

The CPU speed increase will be about 10-20%. This by itself is not a significant improvement over the current CPUs of course. Other benefits:

- Improved (~50%) graphics performance, with full OpenCL and OpenGL support. This will be a huge benefit for battery life and make the automated graphics switching much easier.

- Some reduction in power consumption (maybe another 10-20%)

- programmable TDP (unclear how/if this benefits the MBP)


Ivy will mostly be an evolutionary step - improvements across the board, but nothing that stands out. The improved graphics performance will be huge for MBAs and maybe the 13'' MBP. For the larger MBPs this will be less significant.

 

the cpu increase will be round 10-20% when the comparing the same clocks. The performance jump would be noticeable for you if you did something cpu heavy, if not, there is USB 3 in the chipset to change your mind, again if not, there is the lower power consumption.

And there is the issue regarding new gpus and all that jazz

Not to mention that there is a chance that the mbp 13 would have a quad chip in it, and with the improvement of the HD 4000 in comparison to the HD 3000, I would actually wait.

Those for me are a significant changes, so significant that I might swap my mbp 13 2011 for a mba 13 2012

 

Aside from the GPU there isn't going to be a significant speed difference.
There are some features that will show up along with it like USB 3.0, 28nm GPUs..

What you cannot see in all the numbers is the difference in power consumption and heat output. This should be the biggest difference. A cooler longer running notebook especially at medium load.

Why cannot you see it in those number? Why is the TDP still seemingly the same?
That is kind of difficult to answer because according to Intel their 22nm TriGate transistors should make a quite big jump here. Enough to change the TDP or the clock speeds a lot. One reason why they are really conservative is probably because that new 22nm process isn't as problem free as their last ones. A year ago they still hoped to release it in January 2012 but it got delayed.
You reduce risks they start with lower clock speeds and to play it save keep the TDP the same. AMD did with their first 28nm GPU 7970 something similar. That thing overclocks so well they could have probably released it with 10-15% more clockspeed if they wanted to, or would have been more confident with 28nm.

Intel did something similar with Penryn once. The switch from 65nm to 45nm was without any spec changes at all. They just released almost the same CPU at the same clockspeed and initially with the same TDP. Yet those 45nm CPUs consumed considerably less than the 65nm (about 30% if I remember correctly) A few months later new models where release with 25W instead of 35W TDP. With a more mature process even the 25W could have been lowered considering how well undervolting worked. They probably could released them initially with 25W TDP and no notebook would have had an serious cooling problems.

Today Sandy Bridge runs with Turbo and GPU Trube really close to their TDP rating. In the past there was more security headroom in the TDP. Today with all the automatic shut down and the CPU being able to monitor ever single dangerous part of the chip for temps, they are more confident of really running them close to max.
I believe that Ivy Bridge will have a sort of lower average power consumtion. It might make more use of the Turbo and thus be faster than it looks. A few months in they will probably release lower TDP quads. A refresh with significant clock speed increases is also possible but considering they want to lower main stream TDP to 10-20W I think they will rather lower TDP than increase clockspeeds except for the very expensive high end.


In short the big changes that should be coming cannot be seen on that spec list. We will only know how good 22nm TG is once Intel releases some information, or some better ES test shows up or the first reviews are out. The only thing that is a definite is that speed is not IB selling point. That difference will be marginal and there is nothing you are missing. There are no significant architecture changes (like the new L3 cache ring bus in SB), no integration of anything important. Nothing really worth waiting in regards to number chrunching speed.