The Sandy Bridge Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 27, 2010 2:38 PM ESTFinal Words
If Intel's roadmap and pricing hold true, then the Core i5 2400 should give you an average of 23% better performance than the Core i5 760 at a potentially lower point. If we compare shipping configurations, the Core i5 2400 should actually perform like a Core i7 880 despite not having Hyper Threading enabled. Clock for clock however, Sandy Bridge seems to offer a 10% increase in performance. Keep in mind that this analysis was done without a functional turbo mode, so the shipping Sandy Bridge CPUs should be even quicker. I'd estimate you can add another 3 - 7% to these numbers for the final chips. That's not bad at all for what amounts to a free upgrade compared to what you'd buy today. Power consumption will also see an improvement. Not only will Sandy Bridge be noticeably quicker than Lynnfield, it'll draw less power.
While Nehalem was an easy sell if you had highly threaded workloads, Sandy Bridge looks to improve performance across the board regardless of thread count. It's a key differentiator that should make Sandy Bridge an attractive upgrade to more people.
The overclocking prevention Intel is putting into Sandy Bridge sounds pretty bad at first. However if the roadmap and pricing stay their course, it looks like overclockers looking to spend as much as they did on Core i5 750/760s won't be limited at all thanks to the K SKUs in the mix. The real question is what happens at the low end. While I don't get the impression that the Core i3 2000 series will be completely locked, it's unclear how much rope Intel will give us.
Sandy Bridge's integrated graphics is good. It's fast enough to put all previous attempts at integrated graphics to shame and compete with entry level discrete GPUs. The fact that you can get Radeon HD 5450 performance for free with a Core i5 2400 is just awesome. As I mentioned before, you won't want to throw away your GTX 460, but if you were planning on spending $50 on a GPU - you may not need to with Sandy Bridge.
Assuming mobile Sandy Bridge performs at least as well as the desktop parts, we may finally be at the point where what you get with a mainstream notebook is good enough to actually play some games. I'm really curious to see how well the higher spec integrated graphics parts do once Sandy Bridge makes it a little closer to final (Update: it looks like we may have had a 12 EU part from the start). I should add that despite the GPU performance improvement - don't believe this is enough. I would like to see another doubling in integrated GPU performance before I'm really happy, but now it's very clear that Intel is taking integrated graphics seriously.
Architecturally, I'm very curious to see what Intel has done with Sandy Bridge. Given the improvements in FP performance and what I've heard about general purpose performance, I'm thinking there's a lot more than we've seen here today. Then there are the features that we were unable to test: Sandy Bridge's improved turbo and its alleged on-die video transcode engine. If the latter is as capable as I've heard, you may be able to have better transcoding performance on your notebook than you do on your desktop today. Update: Check out our Sandy Bridge Architecture article for full details on the CPU's architecture.
With Sandy Bridge next year you'll get higher clock speeds, more performance per clock and reasonable integrated graphics at presumably the same prices we're paying today. What's even more exciting is the fact that what we're looking at is just mainstream performance. The high end Sandy Bridge parts don't arrive until the second half of 2011 which add more cores and more memory bandwidth.
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DanNeely - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Maybe, but IIRC Apple's biggest issue with the Clarkdale platform on smaller laptops was wanting to maintain CUDA support across their entire platform without adding a 3rd chip to the board, not general GPU performance. Unless the Intel/nVidia lawsuit concludes with nVidia getting a DMI license or Intel getting a CUDA license this isn't going to change.Pinski - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
I don't think it has anything to do with CUDA. I mean, they sell Mac Pros with AMD/ATI Cards in them, and they don't support CUDA. It's more of OpenCL and high enough performance. However, just looking at these new performance, I'm willing to say that it'll be the next chip for the MBP 13" easily.Pinski - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Well, wait never mind. Apparently it doesn't support OpenCL, which basically puts it out of the picture for Apple to use.starfalcon - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Hmm, they really want all of the systems to have OpenCL?I don't have OpenCL and I don't care at all and I have CUDA but have only used it once.
320M doesn't even have OpenCl does it?
Seems like it would be ok for the less expensive ones to have Intel graphics and the higher end ones to have CUDA, OpenCL, and better gaming performance if someone cares about those.
They'll keep on upgrading the performance and features of Intel graphics though, who knows.
Veerappan - Thursday, September 2, 2010 - link
No, just ... no.Nvidia implements an OpenCL run-time by translating OpenCL API calls to CUDA calls. If your card supports CUDA, it supports OpenCL.
The 320M supports OpenCL, and every Apple laptop/desktop that has shipped in the last few years has as well.
A large portion of the motivation for OS X 10.6 (Snow Leopard) was introducing OpenCL support.. along with increasing general performance.
There is a large amount of speculation that OS X 10.7 will take advantage of the OpenCL groundwork that OS X 10.6 has put in place.
Also, in the case that you have a GPU that doesn't support OpenCL (older Intel Macs with Intel IGP graphics), Apple has written a CPU-based OpenCL run-time. It'll be slower than GPU, but the programs will still run. That being said, I highly doubt that Apple will be willing to accept such a performance deficit existing in a brand new machine compared to prior hardware.
Penti - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
It has more to do with nVidia's VP3 PureVideo engine which they rely on for video acceleration. It's as simple as that.Which is why they only find their place in the notebooks. It's also a low-end gpu with enough performance to say run a source game at low res. And they have more complete drivers for OS X.
CUDA is a third party add on. OpenCL isn't.
burek - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Will there be a "cheap"(~$300) 6-core LGA-2011 replacement for i7 920/930 or will Intel limit the 6/8 cores to the high-end/extreme price segment ($500+)?DJMiggy - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
yea I doubt that will happen. It would be like trying to SLI/crossfire an nvidia to an ati discrete. You would need a special chip like the hyrda one.DJMiggy - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Hydra even. Hydra Lucid chip.Touche - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Questionable overclocking is bad enough, but together with..."There’s no nice way to put this: Sandy Bridge marks the third new socket Intel will have introduced since 2008."
"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."
"In the second half of 2011 Intel will replace LGA-1366 with LGA-2011."
...it is just terrible!
I'll definitely buy AMD Bulldozer, even if it ends up a bit slower. At least they have some respect for their customers and an ability of forward thinking when designing sockets (actually, Intel probably has it too, but just likes to milk us on chipset purchases also). And I am no fanboy, 4 of my 7 PC's are Intel based (two of those 4 were my latest computer purchases).