Intel Outlines Next-Generation 'Sandy Bridge'

Intel's annual Intel Developer Forum (IDF) will take place this September in San Francisco, and undoubtedly the star of the show will be "Sandy Bridge," the next generation microarchitecture set to succeed "Nehalem," which is approaching its second birthday.

That's in keeping with Intel's (NASDAQ: INTC) "tick-tock" strategy. The "tick" is a process shrink of an existing architecture. For example, "Penryn" in 2007 was about taking Intel's Core microarchitecture from 65 nanometers to 45nm, and "Westmere" in 2009 took the Core i7 from 45nm to 32nm.

The "tock" is a new architecture. In 2006, it was Core for desktops and Xeon servers. In 2008, it was Nehalem, sold as Core i3/i5/i7 on the desktop and Xeon. In 2010, that next generation architecture is "Sandy Bridge." Earlier this week, Intel gave attendees of its IDF Beijing conference an early look.

David Perlmutter, executive vice president and co-general manager of the Intel Architecture Group (IAG), said that production will begin in the fourth quarter of this year. "It is an impressive leap in energy efficiency, significant advancements in media and 3D performance and we're introducing a new set of instructions called Advanced Vector Extensions," said Perlmutter in his keynote.

Sandy Bridge processors are believed to come with a native six-core design, four CPU cores and two graphics cores, but Permutter did not confirm that.

Like the Westmere, it will have low-end integrated graphics processors on die. But Sandy Bridge will clean up what has been something of a hacked together design with Westmere, where the GPU chips are 45nm and the CPU cores are 32nm and they are two separate chips connected by a high-speed interconnect. The memory controller is in the GPU chips, so any time the CPU wants to go out to main memory, it has to go through the GPU to the memory controller and out to the RAM.

Intel Fulfills a Dream

"Over time, that does add some delay," noted Nathan Brookwood, research fellow with Insight 64. "Sandy Bridge is a much more elegant and cleaner design where everything is integrated on a single piece of silicon, and as a result Intel will finally fulfill that long-held dream of having its graphics technology on the same die as the CPU technology. That should provide some upgrade in terms of performance."

Perlmutter also said the CPU and GPU will share the same cache memory as a means of improving performance. Sandy Bridge will come with Hyper-Threading, the ability to run two threads per core, and Turbo Boost, which turns off idle cores and adds clock speed to a single core when performance is needed.

Perlmutter said there would be enhancements in Turbo Boost in power management for Sandy Bridge but did not elaborate. Both features are found in Intel's current processors and it will use the QuickPath Interconnect (QPI) found in Nehalem and Westmere.

A key feature of Sandy Bridge is Intel Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX), which can be described as the next generation beyond the SSE (Streaming SIMD Extensions) that increase software performance in floating point, media processing, and other processor-intensive applications. AVX will be much more powerful and faster than anything currently seen in SSE.

It is also believed that Intel will support DDR3 memory modules running at 1600MHz, faster than the memory on the Westmere platform, which tops out at 1333MHz, and Sandy Bridge has four memory channels vs. Westmere's three channels. With its four channels, Sandy Bridge will allow for desktops with up to 32GB of memory, a boost over the 24GB of today's Westmere.

AVX "is a cleaner way to do SIMD kinds of operations so you can do multiple floating-point operations in a single instruction. They are going to have it in Sandy Bridge and AMD will have it in Bulldozer [AMD's next major core design due next year]. 2011 will be the year of AVX," said Brookwood.

Intel will discuss Sandy Bridge in greater detail at this fall's Intel Developer Forum this September 13-15.

Andy Patrizio is a senior editor at InternetNews.com, the news service of Internet.com, the network for technology professionals.