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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."
Old news. My 386 has turbo mode. Wake me when they add math coprocessors to this beast.
Please let me push a button on the case to enable "turbo" mode.
The graphics have already been benched. Anand had early samples and showed that the Intel integrated SB video was actually faster than a Radeon 5450 in most cases. Yeah, that's not great, but for integrated graphics that's pretty damned impressive.
AMD has a new arch coming out which will go by Bulldozer for the mainstream and Bobcat for the low end netbook market. It looks to be pretty bad ass, as their hyperthreading will have an actual integer per thread with only the floating point being shared. Last I heard they were using the 5450 Radeon GPU for their integrated so it will definitely pump out the graphics. Next year should be an interesting time for us builders.
Sadly I'll probably sit this round out as my AMD quad is already faster than I am and at 8Gb of RAM I don't see myself needing anything else for quite some time, but Bulldozer based rigs should be great and affordable for my customers and if Bobcat rocks as well as their AMD Neo + Radeon discrete it'll make a kick ass multimedia netbook chip. According to those I've sold Neo dual based netbooks to they are getting around 5 hours on a charge and the graphics and video performance is awesome, and Bobcat is supposed to cut the power by anywhere from 40-60%.
So it looks like either way you go next year is gonna be a nice time for new gear. Faster and better graphics, cool. BTW, does anyone know if the Intel will support some sort of hybrid SLI? The AMD allows you to put a low end discrete with the onboard and bring it up to midrange GPU performance. Of course the way Intel has been trying to hamstring Nvidia lately it wouldn't surprise me if it don't. You'd think Intel would just accept they suck at GPUs and buy Nvidia already. And if Nvidia doesn't end up buying Via so they can offer an "all in one" solution like Intel and AMD I predict it's gonna be some bad times for them, with Intel trying to squeeze them out of their sandbox and AMD not needing them since buying ATI.
ACs don't waste your time replying, your posts are never seen by me.
Yeah, but for virtualization workloads we're seeing that the processor really isn't being taxed at all. Basically the controlling factor is the amount of RAM and I/O latency. Speaking of which... Sandy Bridge is only two channels of RAM per socket instead of the current three.
Help stamp out iliturcy.
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... :)
XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Wow. The nonsense..it hurts my brain.
First, IA64 is not a "64-bit x86 extension", it's a new ISA. AMD released x86_64 and Intel did very shortly after.
Second, Intel has had integrated CPU/GPUs out for a while. And you're crazy if you think Intel chips (now, not back in the bad old P4 days) draw more power and run hotter than AMD chips.
Basically everything you said is either wrong or backwards, and you confuse me because of this.