While the world is still talking about Intel's shift from 45nm to 32nm, Intel has gone one step ahead and added a 22nm 8-core processor microarchitecture to their design roadmap.

At the Intel Developer Forums, Intel talked about their 'Tick, Tock' model of chip development, transition from 45nm to 32nm and also briefed about the 22nm chip design plans. This update comes in the wake of Intel's talks with regional R&D engineers, who shared the project status for next 5 years. A French site called CanardPlus managed to grab the slide from Intel Developer Forum.

In the 'Tick, Tock' model, Tock means a new CPU architecture every two years followed by the Tick which means die-shrink. Intel has announced the 45nm Nehalem's successor called Westmere (previously Nehalem-c) on 32nm die-shrink due for release in 2009. Westmere's special feature is the 8-core CPU design where each core will have its own 512 KB L2 cache, and general divided 16 MB cache at the third level.

During 2011-12, Intel plans to release 'Ivy Bridge' as the first 22nm chip in 2011, and then follow it up with the 22nm microarchitecture, codenamed Haswell, that will carry 8-cores in 2012. The Ivy Bridge will be released after 'Sandy Bridge' (previously named Gesher) from the 32nm microarchitecture in 2010.

Here's snapshot of Intel's processor roadmap:

2009: Tick: Westmere - 32nm, 6-cores with HT, IMC and QPI
2010: Tock: Sandy Bridge - 32nm, 8-cores with HT, IMC, QPI, and the revolutionary new AVX game instruction technology

2011: Tick: Ivy Bridge - 22nm
2012: Tock: Haswell - 22nm, with a native 8-core design for on-die data and instruction caching along with integrated vector co-processor

Check more about Intel's road map at the CanardPlus's translated version here.

Source: Madshrimps Forum