Intel has sent out invitations stating that it would be officially launching the Sandy Bridge CPUs during its keynote at the 2011 Consumer Electronics Show (CES), which is the largest consumer technology tradeshow (official site). Intel’s keynote will be on January 5, 2011.
Sandy Bridge is the next, or second, generation of Intel’s Core CPUs, and will be manufactured using a 32nm process, and was formally discussed at the Intel Developer Forum back in September. Part of that process with the Sandy Bridge CPUs involves the graphics processing being fully on the processor and sharing cache with the cores in a much closer manner. It will bring the graphics processing much closer to dedicated video chipsets or cards, which might eventually shake up the gaming/accessory market.
Speculation is that it will be higher-end Core cpus, including both dual-core and quad-core versions, that will be introduced at the CES keynote. The mobile/laptop versions start at 2.2GHz (dual-core), and there are two lines. Unfortunately we probably won’t see any netbook CPUs just yet.
The thing that interests a lot of us (and a lot of manufacturers) is that there will be a solid performance increase without increasing the size of the CPU and related chipset. 1080p video playback maybe available on lower-power systems as well.
Sandy Bridge processors should be available almost immediately from some manufacturers. It’s a follow-up to the Nehalem architecture, and uses the same process as Westmere (Nehalem-C). One new feature is “Advanced Vector Extensions” (AVX) which are a sequel/addition to SSE. I don’t know if it will be discussed, but there is a feature in Sandy Bridge that allows for remote disabling and/or wiping of information for a hard drive if a PC or notebook should be stolen or lost. It can be done through a 3G signal or internet connection.
Intel’s “Oak Trail” platform for tablets, including the Intel Atom Z600 series, could also be discussed/launched.
Sandy Bridge will be going head-to-head with AMD’s Fusion Platform later in 2011. PC Magazine published an article discussing the competition.