The Sandy Bridge Preview

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• tatertot - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link

  Can you also confirm whether or not the GPU turbo was also disabled?

• DanNeely - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link

  Do you think Intel will be sharing preliminary performance/pricing data on LGA 2011 by the time that the first LGA 1155 parts start shipping? I'm on 1366 now and would like to know if staying on the high end platform will be a reasonable option or if there isn't any point in holding off for another 6 months on my upgrade.

• Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link

  I wouldn't expect any near-final LGA-2011 performance data until Q2 next year, well after the LGA-1155 launch.
  
  Take care,
  Anand

• Casper42 - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link

  2 things jumped out at me
  
  1) No USB3 - Major FAIL. Putting USB3 in an Intel chipset will drive huge adoption rates rather than this limping in BS by manufacturers today. Not to mention that for Hard Drives, USB2 has been a bottleneck for a long time whereas only top end SSDs today are maxing out SATA3
  
  2) 2 chips with Quad Core and no HT that are identical except for Clock speed and one of them is essentially the 400 and the other is the 500? WTF? Call them the 2410, 2420, 2430, etc. That gives you like 8 or 9 speed bins for that family. Whomever is doing the numbering at Intel needs a swift kick to the head to get them back on track mentally as things just get more and more confusing. You have the i3/i5/i7 today, why not just change it to:
  i2 = Dual Core no HT/Turbo
  i3 = Dual Core with HT and/or Turbo
  i4 = Quad Core no HT/Turbo
  i5 = Quad WITH
  i6 = Six without
  etc
  As it stands now we have i5 with both dual and quad core and i7 with 4 and 6. just doesnt make sense.

• dertechie - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link

  That's quite the IPC improvement there. Not quite Netburst to Core 2 but a lot more than I expected (I was expecting something on the order of 5%, with most gains coming from ramping clocks with the extra headroom of 32nm).
  
  Question is, do I want the i5-2500K more than I loathe Intel's motherboard department? I'm seeing them bring out new sockets almost as often as new processor families, which really, really does not make me confident in the socket's future.
  
  I will wait at least for Bulldozer benches before buying whatever makes sense at that time (okay, probably weighted in AMD's favor). I've lasted 4 years on this Pentium D, I can live another half of one.

• IntelUser2000 - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link

  Why do some people still compare Netburst vs. Core 2? The Pentium 4 generation was a clock speed focused that that FAILED to realize its clock speed potential so it looked really bad compared to Core 2.
  
  Compared to Core Duo Core 2 was only 15-20% faster. Sandy Bridge manages to do another 20%, which is really good in a generation, yea?

• ssj4Gogeta - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link

  Pentium D to SB will be such a huuuuge jump, lol.

• neslog - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link

  Your excellent article was exciting to read. Thank you!
  
  I noticed a small typo on the Windows 7 Gaming Performance page in the first line under the Data Recovery chart : "Clock for clock...to the i7{5} 760..."

• ET - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link

  I think that the integrated graphics here are a game changer. Sure nobody will look to them for serious gaming, but finally they're at a point where if you buy any CPU you will be able to play most games, even if at low settings. I'll be looking forward especially to the mobile CPU's. With Bobcat around the corner, I guess next year we will finally see mainstreams notebooks become capable of some game playing, which will be great (and bad for NVIDIA).

• Exodite - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link

  What I'd like to see is something like Nvidia's Optimus make it to the desktop. With both AMD and Intel going for on-chip integrated graphics the market is practically begging for a unified standard for graphics switching.
  
  The next-generation IGPs look to be competent enough for anything but high-end gaming, which means I should be able to power down my discrete graphics card completely most of the time. The end result would be significant reductions in noise generation, power usage and heat emissions.
  
  Having discreet graphics cards reduced to basically connector-less, slot-in cards for on-demand co-processing seems the logical step.