Hardware Future Sandy Bridge microarchitecture by Intel

[Westside]

According to the Intel roadmap, in late 2009 and early 2010 they will release a legendary processor called sandy bridge. The specs were as follows:
* 32 nm process.
* 8 "nodes"/processor.
o 4 cores/node (32 cores).
+ 4 threads/core (128 threads).
* 2 GHz clock speed or higher.
* 512 KB L2 cache/node.
* 3 MB last level cache/node (24 MB total).
* Ring bus that connects the last level caches.
* 2009-2010 release timeframe.
* A 15x performance improvement over the Xeon 5100.
* Aimed at Sun's UltraSPARC T1 and its successors.


* 4 GHz clock speed.
* 4 to 8 out-of-order cores.
* Without SSE: 8 DP GFLOPS/core (2 DP FP/clock), 32-64 DP GFLOPS/processor.
* With SSE: 28 DP GFLOPS/core (7 DP FP/clock), 112-224 DP GFLOPS/processor.
* 32 KB L1 cache/core, (3 clocks).
* 512 KB L2 cache/core, (9 clocks).
* 2-3 MB L3 cache/core (8-24 MB total) (33 clocks), most likely pooled and dynamically allocated among the cores.
* 64 bytes cache line width.
* 256 bytes/cycle Ring bus bandwidth. The ring bus connects the cores.
* 0-512 MB GDDR / fast DRAM.
* 64 GB/s GDDR / fast DRAM memory bandwidth.
* 17 GB/s memory bandwidth per QuickPath link with 50 ns latency.

I looked and this and I flipped, 32 cores and 128 threads with 24MB cache. 15X performance of one of the top performing current Xenon CPU by Intel. However, I doubt this guy will be too useful for gaming in even the next 6 or 7 years. Why can't graphics technology be as quick evolving as this? Every generation, the jump between GPU is so low that it is sad.... (Geforce 8800 and 9800) However, ATI seems to be doing an ACCEPTABLE job.

 

[juggernaut911]

Intel just paves the road for desktop computer future

 

[fischju]

People use PCs for CPU intensive tasks much more than GPU ones. Right now, 80% of the reason people need high end video cards are for gaming, mostly playing console ports.

I will have to get one of these if it supports socket 775

 

[coolbho3000]

Let me guess. The new LGA socket?

 

[Westside]

People use PCs for CPU intensive tasks much more than GPU ones. Right now, 80% of the reason people need high end video cards are for gaming, mostly playing console ports.

I will have to get one of these if it supports socket 775

It will use socket B, meaning LGA1366. 1366 pin socket...

Although AMD had thousand pin sockets long ago.

 

[fischju]

I will have to get a new mobo for this $1200 beast (estimate)

 

[FAST6191]

I rarely see apps making decent use of quad core stuff (video and some CAD), games just seem to be happy with the OS on one core and the other to themselves.

This being said video and CAD are two of the main reasons I use a PC so colour me interested. Should something like this become remotely mainstream we could even start to see the rise of H264 (decoding is nearly sorted but encoding is still a pain).

Having tangled with x86 for a few years now I am slowly joining the people who are happy to leave it behind, hopefully this can do something on that front.

Re: graphics cards. They may not be pushing processors but ram and architecture design is still important and that they are certainly pushing more than the others.

 

[Westside]

I rarely see apps making decent use of quad core stuff (video and some CAD), games just seem to be happy with the OS on one core and the other to themselves.

This being said video and CAD are two of the main reasons I use a PC so colour me interested. Should something like this become remotely mainstream we could even start to see the rise of H264 (decoding is nearly sorted but encoding is still a pain).

Having tangled with x86 for a few years now I am slowly joining the people who are happy to leave it behind, hopefully this can do something on that front.

Re: graphics cards. They may not be pushing processors but ram and architecture design is still important and that they are certainly pushing more than the others.

Intel is currently researching the "mitosis" project. This is supposedly able to breakdown single threaded processes into multiple threads, making it so that it can fully utilize different cores. As far fetched as it sounds, it has worked before for concept type chips. However, the amount of performance/watt and power consumption out of a single CPU has rendered this a very negative feature. AMD actually tried to create a software that can do this, but failed miserably.