Ask Your 2nd Gen Intel Core Processor Questions Here, Update: Now with Answers!

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• n0b0dykn0ws - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link

  Ask if they have fixed the 24 FPS issue that exists in Clarkdale.

• n0b0dykn0ws - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link

  For some reason my comment regarding twenty-four versus twenty-three point ninety-seven isn't staying.
  
  Please ask if they have fixed the issue that Clarkdale chips suffer from.

• aeassa - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link

  Will there be a high end version of SB that has more cores/cache and perhaps no integrated graphics?

• Catalina588 - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link

  Yes, late 2011 using Socket 2011.

• James5mith - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link

  Will the Sandybridge platforms from Asus be UEFI natively?
  
  Will they have USB 3.0? How many ports? The traditional 2, or 4+?
  
  With Sandybridge, will there be any kind of desktop variant of "Optimus" or an equivalent. I.e. switching between on-die and discrete GPU's? Is this even possible with an Intel chipset instead of an nVidia one?
  
  Have there been any design headaches for motherboards with the new native SATA6Gbps/3Gbps mixed controller? Routing issues, etc.
  
  What kind of power phases are required by the new platform?

• Shadowmaster625 - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link

  Why is there a multiple channel memory controller, but no integrated SSD controller? Especially since it is almost universally accepted that the major bottleneck in most systems is the storage subsystem? By having an integrated SSD controller as part of the CPU, you allow OEMs to place a flash DIMM socket on the motherboard which gives us expandable flash memory at a fairly low cost. Or they could just solder 16-128GB of flash onto the mobo. Either way, the lower cost of flash memory without having to pay for the controller would encourage OEMs and consumers both to use flash as their primary OS storage. Then we could totally get rid of these slow lowest common denominator PC's that all developers must cater to.

• xxxxxl - Saturday, December 11, 2010 - link

  Thumbs Up!
  I want to know this too.
  
  BUT with PCIe SSD coming out, i think this is one way to do it?(Since there is an integrated PCIe)

• mindless1 - Sunday, January 9, 2011 - link

  Because you have to stop somewhere and the fact is, most PCs do not sell with SSDs installed nor can most people even run SSDs because there is not enough flash chip manufacturing capacity for so many SSDs, possibly not even if the mobile market didn't grab up the majority of chips.
  
  You wrote "allow OEMs to place a flash DIMM socket on the motherboard" but that is an extra slot they have to find room for, when already you could buy a PCIe SSD, and let's not forget that Intel will have to either develop this controller suitable for on-die or buy someone's IP, make the CPU die ever larger and expensive while reducing yields. It makes little sense when even then you still have a southbridge. In other words, southbridge is a more feasible place to put such a controller if there were no other obstacles.
  
  Soldering the memory on the board is not a good option, it ties up valuable chips in stock that may end up surplus goods sold at a loss, and puts motherboards beyond mass market appeal into an extremely expensive pricing tier.
  
  Consumers don't need "encouraged" to do what you want, they need to decide for themselves when to do it, plus you are seeming to imply there is a benefit when there probably is not in this day and age, it is cost vs flash chip shortages/pricing, not the performance bottleneck of SATA that is keeping mass adoption at bay.
  
  Further, most people are not very concerned about their HDD performance because contrary to benchmarks which seem to imply SSD is really important, real people in the real world tend to use and reuse the same apps and OS files which today are cached into gigs of main system memory.
  
  Further, flash controllers have been getting faster every few quarters, do you really want a multi-hunded dollar investment built into your CPU and soldered onto your motherboard only to find that 6 months later you could have had a lot higher performing regular SSD for no additional cost vs the integration you seek?

• Itany - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link

  I heard that the AVX excution pipeline is the combination of SSE int and fp pipeline, thus the int instruction throughput is doubled, while the fp throughput maintains the same as SSE.
  
  Is that true?
  
  If the complexity of the full width pipeline could not be overcomed, should the FMA instruction be a better way to enhance the throughput under the x64 architecture?

• sihv - Thursday, December 9, 2010 - link

  I did not notice any other comments regarding virtualization which is surprising. Will SB CPUs and chipsets support VT-x and VT-d?
  
  Secondly I'd like to know if the integrated GPU is disabled when a discrete card is in use. Others have asked this too, but I don't want to disable it, I want to keep both! If virtualization support is there, I'm hoping I can set up a Xen environment with a Linux host using integrated graphics and a Windows guest with a dedicated discrete graphics card given to it via Xen's VGAPassthrough. I know this might not work yet as it's quite experimental but I'd like to at least have the possibility to try it out.