Intel will start manufacturing processors spawning of the new Sandy Bridge architectures by Fall. During the opening speech of Intel Developer Forum 2010 the processor giant confirmed that it will introduce a new set of processor instructions called AVX, Advanced Vector Extension. Instructions that will improve performance in floating point calculations, which would include video, audio and image processing.
Multimedia processing is something Intel has been good and Sandy Bridge will strengthen its position further, which rimes well with the development of the market. Performance will be better at the same clock frequency compared to today’s Nehalem architecture through improved IPC, reflected in the 20% we’ve been hearing so much about.
As a “tick” in Intel’s processor strategy Sandy Bridge is a new architectures and made with an already tested and familiar node, Intel’s 32 nanometer technology.
Intel has already started shipping thousands of test samples of Sandy Bridge processors to partners. It started doing so in the first quarter.
The first Sandy Bridge processors will ship with two or four cores and as previously revealed they will have an improved Turbo Boost technology. HyperThreading is there too, but that Intel has once again revised its integrated graphics circuit and it will now support general-purpose computing (or GPGPU as ATI/NVIDIA calls it).
Sandy Bridge will house in a new LGA1155 platform with the Intel 6 chipset (Cougar Point) supporting SATA 6.0 Gbps and other pleasantries. Still no USB 3.0.
The first dual and quad-core processors are slated to appear in Q1 2011 with hexa and octo-core models arriving in Q2 2011.
