IDF 2010: Intel Presents Sandy Bridge!

Say hello to Sandy the silicon queen, designed to break all kinds of records and work her way into a whole host of upcoming devices. Intel unveiled its new Sandy Bridge processor architecture at the Intel Developer Forum and, from what we saw, the results look promising.

Everyone at the IDF was eagerly awaiting the presentation of Sandy Bridge, and it was Intel's Executive Vice President and Head of Processor Architecture, David Perlmutter, who took to the stage to unveil the firm's latest arm in the on-going processor wars. Announced for use in the upcoming 32 nm Intel Core i processors, Sandy Bridge looks set to seriously boost performances. Plus, the move to 22 nm processors has now been confirmed for 2012 (the first models have just gone into production).

Integrated Graphics Processor

The graphics processor already seen in the first Core i5 and i7 chips (12 processing units, DirectX 10) is now totally integrated into the processor. A new ring-based architecture allows the integrated graphics engine to share resources like cache or a memory reservoir with the processor core. This serves to increase processing and graphics performance. What's more, it can be further optimised using a Turbo Boost function first seen in the Nehalem architecture of the first Core i models. We saw games like Starcraft 2 running smoothly, while the processor simultaneously encoded a video of all the on-screen action.

Turbo Boost: Intel's Answer to Overclocking

Sandy Bridge has a new and improved version of the Turbo Boost function. All of the processor's cores can be overclocked, even when they're all in use. So long as the processor isn't already too hot, the frequency of the cores can increased as and when a given application requires more power, even if the TDP (Thermal Design Power) is exceeded. This new Turbo Boost can also be applied to the graphics part of the processor, depending on where the system's demands are coming from. This gets the best out of the processor for optimal operation no matter what you've got running.

No Native USB 3.0

Like Intel's previous processors, the new Sandy Bridge models will have integrated DDR3 and PCI Express controllers. There's also support for DisplayPort and HDMI 1.4. However, we were a bit disappointed to see no USB 3.0 compatibility natively integrated into the Sandy Bridge architecture.

Finally, a new set of AVX instructions (Advanced Vector Extensions) help improve image processing and performances when dealing with large blocks of data. This looked pretty effective in the demonstration we saw.

Intel seems to have all it takes to stay number one in terms of performance and efficiency with the Sandy Bridge architecture. We'd better start saving our pennies now though, as all this new processing power is sure to come at a pretty high price. Sandy Bridge processors should be rolled out in 2011 and we'll hopefully to get hold of one to test sometime near the release date.




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