Intel's 'Sandy Bridge' to use new specialized silicon

CNET ^ | August 17, 2010 7:48 PM PDT | Brooke Crothers

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge processors will include new circuits for handling demanding multimedia tasks, according to sources, more evidence of processor changes in store as the chip giant gets ready to shift over to a new processor architecture.

Sandy Bridge is Intel's next microarchitecture, or redesign, of its processors--which the chipmaker does every two years. The current design, Nehalem, was introduced in November 2008 and is used in all Core i3, i5, and i7 processors, which now populate the newest PCs worldwide. Sandy Bridge chips are scheduled to go into commercial production in the fourth quarter, and the first PCs are expected before or during the January 2011 Consumer Electronics Show.

For the first time on any Intel chip, Sandy Bridge will include silicon dedicated to handling the transcoding, or converting, of data from one format to another. The transcoding circuits will be separate from the main processor and the on-chip graphics function, according to sources at system makers.

Sandy Bridge's basic layout.(Credit: Intel)

Transcoding, for instance, converts a movie on a PC to a format that makes it viewable on an iPhone or iPod. More generally, transcoding is used whenever a movie or audio clip is transferred from a camera to a computer. Sandy Bridge will excel at this task, compared with current Core i series chips, sources said.

[ShadowAce]

[antiRepublicrat]

Remember when RISC was supposed to be the future of high speed computing?

Almost every cell phone in the world runs RISC, and the smartphones are getting to be faster than the notebooks of only a few years ago while using a tiny fraction of their power. x86 dominated the "high-speed" portion for a while, but these days people are more interested in the highest performance for a specific power draw. People want it for their battery-powered devices, businesses want it because power is expensive. RISC absolutely dominates in that calculation.

[Dr. Sivana]

People want it for their battery-powered devices, businesses want it because power is expensive. RISC absolutely dominates in that calculation.

I am aware of ARM and their dominance in the Smartphone market. Interestingly, Microsoft, who used to back Windows NT for a variety of processors, including RISC processors, backed out of that (MIPS, Alpha) and of course Apple dumped the PowerPC for Intel. This almost certainly has more to do with market forces (IBM was NOT going to let Apple get enough chips in a timely manner, Intel welcomed the new customer, and Apple has AMD as an alternative if it is ever necessary. Plus, the $$ savings at the hardware level by having standardization on x86 / Intel x64).

So what we have is CISC continuing to dominate the desktop/workstation/notebook market (including Linux boxes), splitting on netbooks (Intel Atom has a healthy share), and competely losing out on the smartphone, iPad, smart gizmos end. I don't know if the Itanium is truly RISC, or if anyone really runs it. I assume IBM's Cell is RISC, though it's dominant feature is its scalability (as you noted was a big plus with RISC). What we have is a segmented market. Once you have armies of Intel x86 and ARM programmers and tools in place, they won't get displaced easily.

[rarestia]

If you’re referring to Nehalem, the current microarchitecture, that’s actually a river in Oregon near Intel’s home office.

[antiRepublicrat]

I don't know if the Itanium is truly RISC, or if anyone really runs it.

LOL! The SS Itanic. But it wasn't really RISC.

I assume IBM's Cell is RISC, though it's dominant feature is its scalability

The Cell is RISC. It is essentially a RISC PowerPC CPU with eight SIMD units on steroids (the SPEs). Like the POWER it concentrates on throughput, being able to achieve real-world bandwidth of almost 200 GB/s. This is how Toshiba had one running 48 DVD streams simultaneously to show live movie thumbnails on a TV.

Once you have armies of Intel x86 and ARM programmers and tools in place, they won't get displaced easily.

It does get interesting, but it won't just be x86 and ARM. Currently for phones we mainly have armies of Java and Objective C programmers. Windows .NET development doesn't care about the processor whether it's on x86 or ARM. But Cell programming is a strange creature unto itself. It's apparently more difficult to program for since you will only achieve performance if you know how to juggle those SPEs just right. Early PS3 games only used the PowerPC core since developers didn't know how to leverage the SPEs.

[Mr. K]

is not

[rarestia]

It is a river in Oregon:

Nehalem River

But I may have misspoken about their headquarters. Nonetheless, the write up about the architecture specifically states that it was in reference to Nehalem indian culture:

Nehalem Microarchitecture

[downwdims]

And transcoding

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Intel is probably quicker on those apps.