Intel Unveils 'Sandy Bridge' Architecture 163
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."
Re:The important question is... (Score:3, Informative)
If you went with 1156, which I did (P55 Classified + i7 860 @ 4.0 Ghz), then you're screwed, just earlier, since it's now Socket 1155, which isn't compatible even though it's just a 1 pin difference.
I wasn't very happy with Intel when I found this out, since they've recently switched sockets after holding on to 775 for so long, but from my understanding AMD has also done something with the AM-2/3 socket where some motherboards are back/forwards compatible, but others aren't. I think there is a derivative socket, Am-2/3+, that is backward compatible but the Am2-3 standard version isn't forwards compatible. Don't take my word on it though, my builds have been Intel since the Q6600 came out. AMD has done a better job of backward compatibility but the sweet spot for price/performance + overclocking has been Intel chips whenever I've done my last few builds, and I only do builds every few years, usually after new architectures are released so my motehrboards are usually replaced as well.
Anandtech covered upcoming socket changes in more detail in their writeup [anandtech.com]
Re:Time to buy all new chipsets! (Score:3, Informative)
I'm not sure about the desktop side, but on the server side it is certainly not two dimms.
Each bank is composed of three dimms and there are multiple channels per proc.
While I don't have the details on me it's pretty easy to see that both camps have significantly increased their memory footprint and it's quite easy to build a system with 256gb of ram or greater.
In a few instances there are systems types which do tax the proc far more then others. For these types of systems and other instances where licensing per core is extremely costly there is another type of processor which has a significantly higher clock frequency, but the trade off is far fewer cores. (This is entirely a good thing when considering licensed applications).
Re:What is TDP? (Score:3, Informative)
Thermal Design Power. Basically a measure of the amount of cooling required to prevent the chip frying.
Re:second generation core? (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Not worth upgrading really... (Score:1, Informative)
these days its harder and harder to achieve higher clock speeds due to the speed limits of current transistor technologies, so instead we just add more and more transistors.
its easier to add extra flipflops than to make faster flipflops.
for the most part, programs benefit more from clock speed than parallelism, but that mostly depends on the way the program was coded\compiled.
some apps are able to take advantage of all 12 threads on a i7 980x, which is good since clock speed aint gonna go up much in the near future.
so if more apps could be designed to take advantage of the increasing amount of cores, it would be a better computing environment.
actually intel makes compilers for various different languages that come with parallelism toolkits, that help recompile existing code for parallel execution.
nevertheless, its better to write code for parallel processing from the getgo.
Re:I have first-ed this article... (Score:3, Informative)
gets shot down every single time
If it gets shot down at all, ignorance is prevailing. Been reading on several forums on lessor known games (Spring RTS, for example) and ATI drivers frequently cause problems. The situation I depicted RECENTLY happened and if you search the archives, various problems are constantly pop up. To imagine this is not a problem is to be delusional. Seriously.
Exactly as I said, if you don't care for OpenGL compatibility, ATI drivers will likely be a good experience for you. If OpenGL and/or alternate platforms are important, ATI is a choice of the ignorant and are fairly likely to experience problems; especially if you play games which are not part of ATI's test suite.
Bluntly, ATI has shit support for OpenGL. Anyone who says otherwise is either ignorant, pushing an agenda, or ignorantly pushing an agenda.
Intel's drivers are frequently a problem too.