Intel's Sandy Bridge, AVX Extensions On Track For Q4 2010

Will Sandy Bridge still work on X58 boards?

I wonder if Sandy Bridge is going to work with x58 motherboard? What I'm concerned about is what LGA socket will be?

I think it's going to be released around maybe October, November, or December. And, I also think that Sandy Bridge should support LGA 1366 socket. I don't know. I am going to wait 'till it comes out.

Sandy Bridge employs LGA 1155 Socket H2 (not 1156) or LGA 2011 Socket R (22nm die shrink). Hence the current line of MBs would be rendered useless once again just like when it was the case during the Core i launch. We would have to end up building the system ground up!!

Like even if the other components remain the same, The MB, CPU & GPU are the main pieces!! Intel common guys, you cant come up with a new socket type every half year?? We Intel fans have to wait for a while till you stabilize a socket before getting one. Like I just built a system with LGA 1156 & 875K Proc, which Intel claimed is Core 2010 line and b4 the end of 2010 Sandy bridge is getting launched!! WTF??

Check here to learn more about Sandy Bridge.

I doubt it's going to be expensive to purchase a brand new bridge, "Sandy Bridge." It better run faster and reduce power consumption.

How exactly does having the CPU and GPU on the same die work? People will still need a separate GPU, right? So what benefits does the integrated GPU offer?

To make it simple until240 a cpu and a gpu do there tasks in different ways and therefore manipulate data completely different from each other as well as separately until very lately. Although they can each do many of the same tasks they do them differently (almost completely opposing difference). So certain things were done primarily by one while others were done primarily (as well as almost completely) by one or the other, while the other was not capable of doing the same thing. With this you may you use a separate GPU, but the two would both lessens some of the load on either side with the data that particular component is better with. Therefore the task will be done in combination that much quicker.

x87? Don't you mean x86?

I mean damn! I have to sell old motherboard and purchase new motherboard that supports LGA 2011 Socket! At least it's going to run tremendously fast! Can't wait for it.

So instead of spending 1K on the 985X now, We should wait for stinky britches?

Alright, a few things here:

1) Until240: Rapid1 is mostly right. The one thing he doesn't mention is die size. Once upon a time -- as in, the last twenty years or so--a GPU was far too big to reasonably package with a CPU. Only a handful of companies ever tried to do it (Cyrix being one) and the resulting products were very poorly received. If you wanted a video display that could handle color and 640x480 or higher, you needed either a separate GPU (at first) or a GPU integrated into the motherboard.

2) Acarzt: No, I mean x87. See here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/X87

In modern parlance, the term "x87" refers to floating point code that does NOT support SSE, SSE2, or any of the other various SIMD (Single Instruction Multiple Data) sets. The Athlon's x87 floating point unit was much more powerful than the Pentium 4s, and the P4's was better than Prescott's.

The result of all this was that if you did a P4 vs Athlon comparison in 2001 using tests released in 1999-2000, the Athlon would win. If you used the handful of updated tests--the tests Intel certainly wanted everyone to use--the P4 won. There was a period of several years where it could be argued that the choice of benchmark made all the difference in the world. This is always true to some extent, but from the 2001-2003 time period it was particularly prevalent. By late in 2003, the P4 was clocked sufficiently high that it tended to compete very well with Athlon chips even in raw x87 FPU code--keep in mind that the P4 was, by this time, running at 3.2GHz with dual-channel DDR400. The Athlon, meanwhile, was nearly a full 1GHz behind and had much less memory bandwidth to work with. The P4's cache latencies and L2 bandwidth were also lower and higher than the Athlon's; Intel prioritized a 2 cycle L1 cache with P4, and the CPU used a 256-bit pipe to L2 cache vs. Athlon's 64-bit pipe.

Then Opteron came out and rewrote the book. We hope you've enjoyed the history lesson. ;)

One other thing:

Sandy Bridge motherboards will NOT be compatible with current LGA1366 / LGA1156 chips. This works both ways, meaning:

1) You won't be able to drop a current Core i3/i5/i7 CPU into a Sandy Bridge board.

2) You won't be able to put a Sandy Bridge processor into a current motherboard.

Cool. Thanks for the info guys.

Actually, socket 2011 will be for both 22 and 32nm chips, but it'll be an enthusiast/workstation socket with PCIe 3.

This means that the system I put together today will be obsolete in a couple of months? That is almost as bad as buyng a new car.

Blazer,

Obsolete by whose standards? If you mean "not top of the line," then that's true. On the other hand, a dual-core Socket 939 system from four years ago still handles everything just fine--and you can game on it, too.

Hardware is only obsolete when it stops being able to do what you want of it in a reasonable timeframe.