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Intel Hardware Technology

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."
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Intel Unveils 'Sandy Bridge' Architecture

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  • Turbo Mode (Score:5, Funny)

    by clinko ( 232501 ) on Monday September 13, 2010 @11:24PM (#33569452) Journal

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

    • Don't we call those "graphics cards"?

      • Re:Turbo Mode (Score:5, Insightful)

        by toastar ( 573882 ) on Monday September 13, 2010 @11:40PM (#33569580)

        Don't we call those "graphics cards"?

        Has Intel ever made a quality graphics coprocessor?

        • Define quality. If you mean stable and get the job done for most people, then I'd say yes. If you mean blazing speed and can run the latest games at a framerate that would melt your face, then no. ATi and nVidia have it covered and Intel is sticking with what they do best, general computer processors.

          Also their Linux driver support is top-notch in this area.

          • by toastar ( 573882 )

            Define quality. If you mean stable and get the job done for most people, then I'd say yes. If you mean blazing speed and can run the latest games at a framerate that would melt your face, then no. ATi and nVidia have it covered and Intel is sticking with what they do best, general computer processors.

            Also their Linux driver support is top-notch in this area.

            By quality I mean it's comparable to a current $200 video card.

            I don't need to play crysis at 60fps, But I sure would like to at least not have OpenGL 3.3 games be stereoscopic.

        • Has Intel ever made a quality graphics coprocessor?

          Exactly - why isn't AMD doing this first? They already have ATI Radeon / Firepro GPUs that are actually decent. All they have to do is drag and drop one of those designs onto their next CPU layout with the next process shrink :) OK, probably not that easy, but surely it's a huge leg up for AMD.

        • I'll actually gave the Intel GPUs a lot of credit these days. They do not compete performance wise with dedicated cards, of course, but then I wouldn't expect them to. What they do is get you an entire graphics feature set, the new ones are fully DirectX 10 compatible, with reasonable speed, video acceleration, and so on in a tiny, tiny power budget. There's a reason why switchable graphics laptops are popular. The dedicated GPU is great, but gobbles up batter life even when throttled down. That integrated

          • Intel graphics also have opensource drivers, including the necessary kernel bits in the vanilla Linux tree. They have been this way for years, and have exposed most of the functionality, unlike the open ATI/AMD drivers. Though it must be said that the latter are improving a lot; I'm currently typing on a Powerbook with Radeon graphics running Gentoo. For some reason, binary Linux PPC drivers are hard to find ;)

            For my uses, Intel GPUs have been powerful enough for years, and this includes HD video playbac

    • by Henriok ( 6762 )
      That would be the integrated x87 FPU that's been present since the 486, now with with MMX, SSE, SSE2, SSE3, SSE4 and AVX.
  • "Core 2" chips were out years ago.
  • They're opening a new factory in Madison county.

  • Intel needs to dump the DMI bus and go all QPI the last thing you want is Intel video lock in and only x16 pci-e lanes.

    • Ultimately for laptops and low end desktops moving all the high speed logic (graphics, CPU, memory controller) into one chip makes a lot of sense from both a cost and a power point of view.

      Yes it's annoying that the option of a nvidia chipset with integrated graphics that were better than intel's while being cheaper and lower power than a dedicated graphics chip with it's own memory has been frozen out by this change.

      Yes it's annoying that you can no longer use a low end CPU with a high end platform or vice

  • Because this is primary motivation as no one is even coming close to maxing out an i7.
    • by 0123456 ( 636235 )

      Because this is primary motivation as no one is even coming close to maxing out an i7.

      Maxing it out at what? Maxing out an i7's CPU performance is trivial on a server that's doing CPU-intensive work.

      • by symbolset ( 646467 ) on Tuesday September 14, 2010 @12:09AM (#33569772) Journal
        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.
        • Re: (Score:3, Informative)

          by Cylix ( 55374 ) *

          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 licensin

        • Currently with intel stuff (it's a while since i've looked at the AMD side) the laptop and low end desktop platforms have 2 channels and at least with the boards i've seen the max configuration supported is 4x4GB for a total of 16GB.

          The current intel high end desktop platform has 3 channels and at least with the boards i've seen the max configuration supported is 4x4GB for a total of 16GB

          Workstation/server platforms go much higher, with the right board and a big enough budget you can get 18x8GB (maybe more

        • On the whole I'd concur, but it does depend very much on your workload - YMMV. For most "enterprisey" setups, you'll probably be running a million and one individual utility servers that spend 99% of their time doing nothing and, if it anything like where I work, management will want every VM is overspecced and treated as if it was a physical machine - "the lowest-end hardware we can currently buy for a domain controller is a quad core box with 4GB of RAM... so all VMs must have at least four processors and

        • For virtualization workloads:

          I run a major virtualization operation (>1000 vms). Dell M600 blades loaded with 32GB of RAM and 2x4 Nehalems run at about 25% CPU utilization when fully loaded down. You can do the memory-cpu math from there. In our operation we'd likely run out of storage throughput first, actually, but the SAN is its own design issue.

          C//

        • by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

          But Sandy Bridge isn't really a server side chip.
          virtualization workloads are not really important for this CPU unless you are running a Mac and Parallels.

      • by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

        An i7 is a desktop chip.
        For a sever you should be using a Xeon or one of AMDs new G34 CPUs. AMD makes an 8 core G34 server GPU that is under $300.

  • Hehehe (Score:4, Funny)

    by squiggly12 ( 1298191 ) on Monday September 13, 2010 @11:33PM (#33569520) Journal
    Please let me push a button on the case to enable "turbo" mode.
    • Re:Hehehe (Score:5, Funny)

      by vertinox ( 846076 ) on Monday September 13, 2010 @11:44PM (#33569608)

      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.

      • by syousef ( 465911 )

        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.

        You should have sold it as a 486 special edition. Would have been cool if you could rigged it up with a speaker to have an extra loud fan noise too ;-)

      • I loved that little light. I won't buy a PC that doesn't give me that little light and a little button to activate it with. Add the ability for me to set the color of the light programmatically, and I'll be brand loyal.

      • Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)

        by account_deleted ( 4530225 ) on Tuesday September 14, 2010 @02:15AM (#33570400)
        Comment removed based on user account deletion
        • i had a AMD 486 DX5 at 133MHz on a 386 case, after some upgrades...

          i connected the turbo button to the Bus speed jumpers, so when i pressed, the bus jumped from 33Mhz to 40Mhz, overclocking the cpu to 160Mhz... i run at "full" speed when i was at home and put the normal speed when i left it idle

          To my surprise, it worked really well, the PCI bus accepted that speed, the network and SCSI card never gave any error until i disconnect the computer about 6 years ago

          i also tried to up the bus to 50Mhz and the CPU,

        • by Kjella ( 173770 )

          The ironic thing is, that the "Turbo" speed was actually the native speed of the CPU. When you disabled turbo, you were actually underclocking it so that applications (games really), would run slower.

          Yeah, what's crazier is that there was no particular "compatibility" speed, they were just slower by some random factor. The only time I ever functionally used turbo was on a 286 that would operate at 8088 speed - the CPU in the original IBM PC - when the turbo was off, everything since that just assumed it could be run on different CPUs of different speeds. It made no sense to make a 33 MHz 386 into a 25 MHz 386 or whatever it was for anything.

      • by Zoxed ( 676559 )

        > 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.

        I bet his amp goes up to 11 as well !

      • Re: (Score:3, Funny)

        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

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

      It's not a button on the case, but several laptops give the user a taskbar control to change the power-management strategy. So you have a "turbo" setting and a "battery life" setting.

  • Wow... (Score:4, Funny)

    by bennomatic ( 691188 ) on Monday September 13, 2010 @11:39PM (#33569570) Homepage
    ...I just drove over the Sandy Bridge this evening. Coincidence? I don't think so!
  • Better/different selection of real gpu's? Or is this just all about a slow all in one Intel on one chip gpu option?
    • The Sandy Bridge GPU is still weak by Apple's standards, but they can't keep using Core 2 forever. As long as OS X can compile OpenCL into AVX code I think Sandy Bridge will work OK in future MacBooks.

    • I would hope you could switch it off with the bios and use a real video card. If not, then this board is pretty useless.
    • by LWATCDR ( 28044 )

      I would say none.
      No support for OpenCL which I feel is really stupid.
      Maybe Apple can make a translator.

  • Videos of some of the Intel demos [goodgearguide.com.au] (GestureTek , Wi-Di)

    and Intel 2nd Generation Core Processor to specialise in media processing [goodgearguide.com.au]

  • by Kartu ( 1490911 ) on Tuesday September 14, 2010 @12:40AM (#33569920)
    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.
  • by Arimus ( 198136 ) on Tuesday September 14, 2010 @01:13AM (#33570080)

    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 .

    • by Arimus ( 198136 )

      Hm. SNAFU something grabbed rest of my post. :-(

      Anyway

      Core i[number of cores] [major design].[revision] would ease confusion.... then just have list of major design to code name mappings (or even append the name when listing cpu's on your product pages if you are a vendor) and job is done; least in terms of stopping the naming confusion.

    • The Core Duo processor was basically a dual Pentium M with SSE3 on a single die. The Core microarchitecture, on the other hand, was found in Core 2 processors.

      http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Core_(microarchitecture) [wikipedia.org]

      This naming scheme will probably continue as long as processors have cores. Makes you wonder how processors worked at all, before the Cores were introduced.

    • by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      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.

      Not really. Sandy Bridge seems to share more architectural similarities with Core/Core2 than with Core i# chips - they were obviously made by different, albeit likely related, internal development teams. SB doesn't support triple channel RAM, for starters.

    • maybe even take a leaf out of the software industry, e.g

      Core i .

      i++;

  • From TFA:

    Of course, we are left wondering what TDP means now, if exceeding it is standard.

    Ironically, I was already wondering that. It never told what TDP is, and a Google define: search wasn’t terribly enlightening.

  • sandy bridge is only going to be like 20-30% faster then what's available right now, the last two generations after core 2 duo have only had modest games in the 20%-30 range. I've not been impressed at all lately, it seems technological leaps have slowed right down for cpu's at least.

    • Wait until the next GUI comes out. Then you'll need the processing power.
    • by CAIMLAS ( 41445 )

      Are you serious?

      Core i5/i7 are significantly faster than the previous generations, even without the built-in overclocking. They're on par with AMD again (at least in terms of performance), and they're got triple channel memory support - a big win. They've also replaced the vastly inferior FSB, allowing for more system throughput that rivals what AMD has, again.

      If you're not seeing gains, then it is quite likely that you do not need the newer processors - that is, the ones with more than one or two cores.

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