Intel Unveils 'Sandy Bridge' Architecture

njkobie writes "Intel has officially unveiled Sandy Bridge, its latest platform architecture, at the first day of IDF in San Francisco. The platform is the successor to the Nehalem/Westmere architecture and integrates graphics directly onto the CPU die. It also upgrades the Turbo Mode already seen in Core i5 and i7 processors to achieve even greater speed improvements. Turbo Mode on Sandy Bridge processors can now draw more than the chip's nominal TDP where the system is cool enough to do so safely, enabling even greater boosts in core speeds than those seen in Westmere. No details of specific products have been made available, but Intel has confirmed that processors built on the new architecture will be referred to as 'second generation Core processors,' and are expected to go on sale in early 2011. In 2012 it is due to be shrunk to a 22nm process, under the name Ivy Bridge."

Comments

Turbo Mode

[clinko]

Old news. My 386 has turbo mode. Wake me when they add math coprocessors to this beast.

This is after their announcement that

[Centurix]

They're opening a new factory in Madison county.

Hehehe

[squiggly12]

Please let me push a button on the case to enable "turbo" mode.

Re:Hehehe

[vertinox]

Please let me push a button on the case to enable "turbo" mode.

Lol. Those were the days. I once worked in a computer shop in the mid 90's where we upgraded some guys 386 to one of the new 486 (DX i think) by swapping out the entire board but we kept the case to save him some money.

He comes back in the shop and complains that the turbo mode doesn't work anymore and we tried to explain with the new models that it was way faster than the 386 even in turbo mode but he didn't seem to understand.

So one of us takes it into the back rigs the button to simply light up the turbu LED when you press it. He seemed pretty happy with the results.

Re:Hehehe

[ricky-road-flats]

Reminds me of a story too...

My Dad had a new-ish 386 PC which he loved, he especially loved how fast it was. One weekend I played some games on it, one of which (maybe Level 42?) needed the turbo off, as it was way too fast to play at the full nosebleed-speed of 33 MHz. I then went away for the week.

When I came back that Saturday lunchtime, he was literally waiting on the driveway for em, purple with fury. He'd been struggling for the whole week with an unuseably slow PC, and he'd tried rebooting, and he'd tried lots of things, and it had ruined his week... basically he was ready to murder me, and woe betide me if I didn't fix it pronto.

I was in a panic - what the hell had broken to make it so slow? Was it something I'd got from a BBS with a virus? Was it some TSR causing an issue?

The panic ended when I walked into his study, and from across the room saw the Turbo light off. I walked over to it, pressed Turbo, and let him try again. Problem solved. It was years before he could laugh about it...

That reminds me, I shoudl dig out Level 42 and try it on my 3.4 GHz machine... maybe running it in DOS in Bochs would slow it down enough?

Wow...

[bennomatic]

...I just drove over the Sandy Bridge this evening. Coincidence? I don't think so!

Re:second generation core?

[Anonymous Coward]

I think Intel wants to confuse the market even more with expressions like "Core 2 quad core 2nd gen".

Re:Not a single word on Intel killing overclocking

[H0p313ss]

Not a single word on Intel killing overclocking, eh? According to anand's article majority of new CPU's won't allow ANY kind of overclocking.

And 128 nerds cried themselves to sleep... :)