Ask Your 2nd Gen Intel Core Processor Questions Here, Update: Now with Answers!
by Anand Lal Shimpi on January 5, 2011 1:01 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Sandy Bridge
- Asus
ASUS and Intel are putting together a webcast that they've invited me to attend. The topic of discussion? Sandy Bridge. The webcast will air after Intel's official announcement of Sandy Bridge at 9AM PST on January 5, 2011 at CES.
The discussion will be a conversation between myself, Gary Key (former AT Motherboard Editor, current ASUS Technical Marketing Manager), and Michael Lavacot, an Intel Consumer Field Application Engineer.
If you have any questions you'd like to see me answer on air or that you'd like me to grill ASUS and Intel on, leave them in the comments to this post and I'll do my best to get them addressed.
Of course we will also have our full review of Sandy Bridge around the same time.
Update: Intel posted some of the videos from this webcast on its YouTube channel. I tried to answer as many of the big questions you guys asked as I could in the video or in our Sandy Bridge review.
I'll add links here for more videos as they get posted:
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xxxxxl - Wednesday, December 15, 2010 - link
Whether for Sandy Bridge, Ivy bridge or future mobile processors, I want to know if Intel will provide a way to disable/enable HyperThreading. Intel is concentrating on the mobile graphic market, and Hyperthreading is known to probably slow games down, so if Intel provides a way to disable HT, power consumption could be reduced while also making games faster.Thanks!
xxxxxl - Thursday, December 16, 2010 - link
One of the main attractions of SB is AVX, so i question how much chance is there of AVX being used?Offwego - Friday, December 17, 2010 - link
Sorry for repetitions:1. (For Intel) Does Intel have plans to add extra EUs prior to Ivy Bridge?
2. (For Anand)What makes you the i52400 has 12 EUs? The retail part is listed with only 6!
3. (For Anand)Do you think turbo was enabled on the graphics, and what difference would turbo make, say from 650 to 1100 for a given system? I assume it would be more complicated than the simple %.
4. Comment: Great website!
xxxxxl - Saturday, December 18, 2010 - link
1. Double the EUs with ivy bridge.2. Anand's ES(engineering sample) i5 2400 used 12EUs. Though the retail will only come with 6.
glad2meetu - Friday, December 17, 2010 - link
I would like to say thank you to Intel for all the hard work that went into developing and manufacturing these new processors. My question is what sort of applications was Intel trying to target that take advantage of the extra 2MB of L3 cache enabled on the new 2600 products relative to the other new processors such as the 2500 products? Another question I have is does Intel see 3-D video and image processing as a critical new application in the future? Currently I see early adoption of 3-D video and image processing happening in the market place with lots of opportunity for improvement in the future as new display technology is introduced. Personally, I am very interested in the 2600 product line due to the 8MB L3 cache and multi threading.xxxxxl - Saturday, December 18, 2010 - link
I've been thinking of the impact of Turbo 2.0 on mobile, where power consumption can be crucial.While the increased performance is great, the increase in power consumption isn't. So i hope that there will be an option in BIOs, where users will be allowed to turn off Turbo 2.0 if they wish.
Take for example a 45W quad core, if an 20% over TDP boost, would mean that the processor goes to 54W. Like, if i buy a 25W processor, why would i want it to go to 35W? make sense?
warden00 - Monday, December 20, 2010 - link
Will Sandy Bridge offer the possibility of ECC memory on desktop or mobile variants? Optionally, is this something Intel might consider adding in future architecture upgrades?smyter - Tuesday, December 21, 2010 - link
Will the motherboards that support Sandy Bridge also support the 24 EU graphics system that will be out with Ivy Bridge?RazerDan - Thursday, December 23, 2010 - link
To Intel:1) Intel traditionally has not taken graphics performance seriously. A reasonable increase in performance was shown now that the GPU is tied to the CPU die. Can we expect a performance increase to be at least as good for Sandy Bridge's die shrink? Does Intel think they can eat into the sales of the low end discrete GPUs enough to remove some "families"?
Side Note: Sandy Bridge performs favorably against the 5450, but in actuality it will need to perform well against the low end 6000 series to compete, which should release in the same time frame. Also, integrated performance in general seemed to be so poor for last generation that AMD was allowed to create a 5th family (Cedar/5450) with comparable performance to RV710, to which Sandy Bridge was compared.
2) Does the increased interest mean we can expect to see reasonable support for video game titles in the future?
3) How does Intel get over the memory bandwidth limitation for its GPU now that it has to share bandwidth/cache directly with the CPU cores? It appears to only have 1 stop on the ring bus in the architecture review. I can easily see Sandy Bridge stuttering any time it needs to fetch new textures, which would make many games unplayable but not hurt avg. frame rates too much. If any laptop (rumor: such as the low end mac book pros) used Sandy Bridge graphics, I would be skeptical of their performance before buying.
To Anand:
4) Every time a new generation of graphics cards comes out, the review seems to discuss anisotropic filtering quality. What is Sandy Bridge's filtering quality and why was it not shown in the Sandy Bridge architecture review?
aeyrg - Saturday, December 25, 2010 - link
Why doesn't Intel put PCH on CPU package or die ?And also if they have any plants to integrate memory on CPU package and ship CPUs with 2/4/8GB/... ram ?