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:Yay for heating my house! (Score:3, Insightful)
Yeah. No one ever buys a desktop, and they certainly don't ever want it to be faster.
Re:Turbo Mode (Score:5, Insightful)
Don't we call those "graphics cards"?
Has Intel ever made a quality graphics coprocessor?
Re:The important question is... (Score:3, Insightful)
I'm assuming that even if there are dead pins on the current socket, that can be used for the video portion, no existing boards will have this capability... so it wouldn't matter anyway, right?
thinkin' new socket.
Re:Yay for heating my house! (Score:3, Insightful)
Really need to rationalise naming (Score:4, Insightful)
Thought the '2' in Core2 referred to the second generation already...
With the Core i3/5/7 being the third these are more like the fourth generation.
Might be time for people who make C(G)PUs to have a rethink on naming schemes... maybe even take a leaf out of the software industry, e.g
Core i .
Re:I have first-ed this article... (Score:2, Insightful)
I would suggest checking out ATI, for the last year and a half or so nVidia has been playing catch up to ATI,
Unfortunately, for the last decade, ATI has been playing catch up to nVidia for quality of drivers. While their quality has improve considerably over the last several years, they are still many years behind that of nVidia; especially for OpenGL drivers.
And like it or not, for Linux, you still have exactly one high end 3D solution - nVidia.
I'd rather be a few frames slower with nVidia than slightly faster and unstable or unplayable with ATI. ATI just has a horrible track record even on Microsoft platforms. Just recently, they went through three drivers releases trying to fix simple OpenGL core features. ATI + OpenGL = horrible user experience. If you only ever use a Microsoft platform, chances are you'll happy with ATI; though even then there tends to be some exceptions. But if any non-Microsoft platforms are important to you, anything but an nVidia solution is a really, really, really bad idea.