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.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Seems to me the new Silicon of the title is new circuitry....

[Dr. Sivana]

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

[jpsb]

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

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

I do....worked on the first IBM RS6000 ...think that is right.

From the Wikipedia:

RISC System/6000, or RS/6000 for short

****************************** E XCE RPT****************

RISC System/6000, or RS/6000 for short, is a family of RISC and UNIX based servers, workstations and supercomputers made by IBM in the 1990s. The RS/6000 family replaced the IBM RT computer platform in February 1990 and was the first computer line to see the use of IBM's POWER and PowerPC based microprocessors. RS/6000 was renamed eServer pSeries in October 2000.

[Viking2002]

I'm in IT support and I'm so bogged down with work, red tape, and serial corporate idiocy, I don't even know what the hell is inside half the boxes I take a tool to anymore. I swear to God, I'm mothballing all my certs and becoming a park ranger. And the deeper in the forest, the better.

"But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: for men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away, for his name is Obama."

[Mr. K]

What? No cute Arabic name this time?

[jpsb]

RISC is alive and well, everyone except intel uses RISC and intel adopted a lot RISC features in it’s chips. The link I posted above points to IBMs new Power (RISC) processor.

[eclecticEel]

Looks great, but I don’t think I can wait till January.

[Dr. Sivana]

I swear to God, I'm mothballing all my certs and becoming a park ranger. And the deeper in the forest, the better.

It won't work. A couple of months ago I applied for an IT manager position at the Lake County Forest Preserve! Once the cell towers went up, it was game over.

[Dr. Sivana]

RISC is alive and well, everyone except intel uses RISC and intel adopted a lot RISC features in it’s chips.

When a chip includes built-in conversion, it is hard to think of it as truly RISC in the same way that RISC had been presented some 20 years ago by the likes of Sun and IBM. Maybe some aspects of some part of the processor can be said to be inspired by RISC approaches, but I suspect that the instruction set is more complex than, say an old 80386 chip. I'm not a chip designer or assembly programmer, so I am prepared to be shown the error of my reasoning.

[The Cajun]

I swear to God, I'm mothballing all my certs and becoming a park ranger. And the deeper in the forest, the better.

Used that basic plan 12 years ago, worked out very well ;^)

[Viking2002]

Hell's bells, I meant getting out of IT! I don't care if it's fisheries management. I'll sit in a jon boat all day with a dip net and a clipboard, and count sunfish and tadpoles.

"But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: for men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away, for his name is Obama."

[downwdims]

I agree. I’m going to build an intel machine around this architecture. I was sold when I built an i5 machine for my pops and if KILLED my 3ghz Phenom 2. And it didn’t even have multi-threading

The stuff to build an 870 ll56 machine is super cheap, pull the trigger.

[jpsb]

You are correct. The intel chip this article talks about is not a RISC chip, it is still a complex instruction set chip (CISC). The main reason INTEL stuck with CISC is to maintain compatibility with older software depended x86 assembly. But Intel borrowed as much as it could from RISC and new instructions are RISC. Other chip makers not dependent on x86 assembly pretty much all went RISC since RISC is proven to be faster and more scalable.

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Let me put a plug in for the AMD Thuban, looks to be ~ the same price as the 870 ....I love my 1090T with 6 cores on an ASUS 880 board runnning at 3.7 GHz...and Linux Mint,...runs cool and has the power for what I do.

[Viking2002]

I'd have gotten a lot more personal satisfaction out of it than my dozen years in IT, I can tell ya.

"But know this, that in the last days perilous times will come: for men will be lovers of themselves, lovers of money, boasters, proud, blasphemers, disobedient to parents, unthankful, unholy, unloving, unforgiving, slanderers, without self-control, brutal, despisers of good, traitors, headstrong, haughty, lovers of pleasure rather than lovers of God, having a form of godliness but denying its power. And from such people turn away, for his name is Obama."

[downwdims]

I could drop a thurban in my rig but a comparable i7/i5 machine smokes it.

I’m a big AMD fan but intel is killing it.

At least AMD is smoking Nvidia

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

You doing games?

[Ernest_at_the_Beach]

Customer Reviews for AMD Phenom II X6 1090T Black Edition Thuban 3.2GHz