The Sandy Bridge Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 27, 2010 2:38 PM ESTA New Socket and New Chipsets
There’s no nice way to put this: Sandy Bridge marks the third new socket Intel will have introduced since 2008. The first was LGA-1366 for the original Nehalem based Core i7. In 2009 we got LGA-1156 for Lynnfield, later updated with support for the dual-core Clarkdale CPUs launched in 2010. Next year, Sandy Bridge will launch with LGA-1155.
The CPU and socket are not compatible with existing motherboards or CPUs. That’s right, if you want to buy Sandy Bridge you’ll need a new motherboard.
As is the case today, there are two lines of chipsets for consumer desktops: H and P series. The H series supports Sandy Bridge’s on-die graphics, while the P series is strictly for discrete graphics.
At launch we’ll have P67 and H67 based motherboards, both of which are in testing right now. A quarter later we’ll see value H61 motherboards added to the mix.
| Chipset Comparison | ||||||
| P67 | H67 | H61 | P55 | H57 | H55 | |
| CPU Support | Sandy Bridge LGA-1155 | Sandy Bridge LGA-1155 | Sandy Bridge LGA-1155 | Lynnfield / Clarkdale LGA-1156 | Lynnfield / Clarkdale LGA-1156 | Lynnfield / Clarkdale LGA-1156 |
| CPU PCIe Config | 1 x 16 or 2 x 8 PCIe 2.0 | 1 x 16 PCIe 2.0 | 1 x 16 PCIe 2.0 | 1 x 16 or 2 x 8 PCIe 2.0 | 1 x 16 PCIe 2.0 | 1 x 16 PCIe 2.0 |
| RAID Support | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Mp |
| USB 2.0 Ports | 14 | 14 | 10 | 14 | 14 | 12 |
| SATA Total (Max Number of 6Gbps Ports) | 6 (2) | 6 (2) | 4 (0) | 6 (0) | 6 (0) | 6 (0) |
| PCIe Lanes | 8 (5GT/s) | 8 (5GT/s) | 6 (5GT/s) | 8 (2.5GT/s) | 8 (2.5GT/s) | 6 (2.5GT/s) |
With P67 you lose integrated graphics but you gain the ability to run two PCIe x8 cards off of the CPU. You also get fully unlocked memory multipliers with P67, whereas H67 is locked to whatever official DDR3 speeds Intel supports with Sandy Bridge (currently DDR3-1333).
Both H67 and P67 support 6Gbps SATA, however only on two ports. The remaining 4 SATA ports are 3Gbps. Motherboard manufacturers will color the 6Gbps ports differently to differentiate.
There’s no native USB 3.0 support on these chipsets, but most motherboard makers are looking to third party solutions to enable USB 3 on Sandy Bridge boards.
The other major (and welcome) change is the move to PCIe 2.0 lanes running at 5GT/s. Currently, Intel chipsets support PCIe 2.0 but they only run at 2.5GT/s, which limits them to a maximum of 250MB/s per direction per lane. This is a problem with high bandwidth USB 3.0 and 6Gbps SATA interfaces connected over PCIe x1 slots. With the move to 5GT/s, Intel is at feature parity with AMD’s chipsets and more importantly the bandwidth limits are a lot higher. A single PCIe x1 slot on a P67 motherboard can support up to 500MB/s of bandwidth in each direction (1GB/s bidirectional bandwidth).
With native 6Gbps SATA support, the faster PCIe interface will be useful for any third party USB 3.0 controllers.
Original Nehalem and Gulftown owners have their own socket replacement to look forward to. In the second half of 2011 Intel will replace LGA-1366 with LGA-2011. LGA-2011 adds support for four DDR3 memory channels and the first 6+ core Sandy Bridge processors.
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DrRap - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
It's Anand "intel" lal Shimpi.Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
I agree that single threaded performance is important to keep in mind. Sandy Bridge had a larger ILP boost than I expected. Final silicon with turbo enabled should address that even more.We got into trouble chasing the ILP train for years. At this point both AMD and Intel are focused on thread level parallelism. I'm not sure that we'll see significant ILP gains from either party for quite a while now.
The socket move is silly, unfortunately there's nothing that can be done about that. AMD takes better care of its existing board owners, that's something we've pointed out in prior reviews (e.g. our Phenom II X6 review).
I'm not sure I'd call Sandy Bridge a kiddie chip however. It looks like it'll deliver great bang for your buck when it launches in Q1 regardless of how threaded your workload is.
Value scatterplots are a great idea, Scott does a wonderful job with them. We're going to eventually integrate pricing data with Bench (www.anandtech.com/bench) which should help you as well :)
Take care,
Anand
ssj4Gogeta - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
I'm guessing USB 3.0 support will be introduced later with a chipset upgrade. Why are you so concerned with GHz when Sandy Bridge delivers more IPC? I think having better IPC instead of more GHz is better as you'll get potentially lower power consumption.asmoma - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Lets just hope AMD trhows in 80 gpu cores into ontario to bring this SB igp to shame(almost the same performance but less than 10w tdp). And lets also hope they throw in those 400 cores into Llano we have been hearing about.mfago - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Any news on OpenCL support? I image Apple may hold off on a purely integrated GPU unless that is supported.Thanks!
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Sandy Bridge's GPU does not support OpenCL. This is strictly a graphics play, Intel doesn't have an announced GPU compute strategy outside of what it's doing with Larrabee.Take care,
Anand
DanNeely - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Is intel actually still doing anything with Larrabee on the gfx side? I thought they killed it on that end entirely and were looking at it strictly as a compute platform now.Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Correct - as of today the only Larrabee parts are for the HPC market. Didn't mean to confuse there :)Take care,
Anand
JonnyDough - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
"Correction, you'll be able to buy it next year, but you'll get to meet her today."Sandy could be a boy too!
JonnyDough - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
By the way, is it a an it, or a girl? You can't have it both ways!