Forget Arrandale, SB Huron River Platform on the Way

Intel to push WiMax with the Huron River mobile Sandy Bridge platform:

Softpedia
Fudzilla

And 3D and HDMI 1.4!:

 

I'm pleasantly surprised to hear that Intel is still pushing out new platforms at a decent clip; I was afraid that without AMD destroying them on benchmarks, they'd get horribly complacent and we'd be stuck with 6+ years of Core 2, just like we got stuck with 6+ years of Netburst. Oddly, lack of competition seems to be driving them to do better, which doesn't really make any sense but whatever, I'll roll with it. I'm really happy with my U30Jc; the Core i3 is incredibly snappy for a "budget" chip, and doesn't skip a beat even in situations that cause my desktop's 3.0 GHz Core 2 Duo to chug a bit (to say nothing of the thrashing it gives my T61's 2.0 GHz C2D).

What frustrates me, though, is Intel on the desktop. Their chips are still really powerful, but their platforms have absolutely zero forward-compatibility, which is fine on a notebook where you have to replace the whole machine anyways, but is rather irksome when you buy a $250 680i with the promise of extended support and then later get told the very next generation of chips that are basically nothing but die shrinks won't run on it. Intel clearly doesn't care about performance per dollar and never has, but Nehalem has seen Intel totally give up on the performance/watt angle as well. AMD chips are just crushing Intel from an economic standpoint, and while I want the best performance possible from my build, it's just really hard to convince myself that Intel's better performance is worth the 100% or more cost premium, especially when you know there's not going to be any upgrade path.

 

I totally forgot about huron river. I'm in the market for a portable high battery life machine that still has decent power. Was gonna go for the m11x refresh with a core i5 ulv. But I got an amazing m17x that I can deal with until Huron River comes out. When the m11x gets upgraded to Huron River platform and sandy bridge cpu's power and battery life will increase. If it's a 20% increase in battery life thats 9.6 hours instead of 8 hours. So probly 8.5-9 hours of wireless time and faster and more power. That's gonna be the ultimate portable gamer when Huron River comes out. I will suffer with my 50 minute gaming battery life of my m17x for 6-8 more months then I'll leave my m17x as a perm mini desktop and have a bad mofo HR platform SB chip m11x. Plan in motion!

 

Nice, SB is worth the wait:

• Intel Wifi+Bluetooth combo chip
• Ability to view 2 Blu-Rays on one charge
• Enhanced Graphics
• 22% smaller die over the 45nm gpu+32nm cpu of current Arrandale
• WIDI to support 1080p

 

So a question, since the IGP is 2x faster and up to two on die graphics chips will we see on chip SLI for up to 4x the performance?

 

I'm strongly inclined to disagree with you there. Lynnfield has the best performance per watt of any desktop CPU.

While Intel's cost-competitiveness in desktops could be better, the $200 Core i5-750 is a very good chip. Also, despite being dual-core, the Core i3-530 is quite solid at $115, and quite competitive with AMD's quad cores.

 

I won't jump until USB 3.0 is integrated.

Intel can choke on light peak.

 

there will be performance improvements.. some say, as significant as going from Netburst Pentium 4s to C2D's

i wouldn't think 3d,widi,wimax, "enhanced gfx" are worth it imo

 

I know I'm excited, and only 6 months away.

 

I dunnoooo... I believe intel itself has said that the top Sandy Bridge is 20% faster than the top Arrandale we have right now. That 20% difference is less than the jump from C2D to Arrandale and I'm sure Pentium 4s to C2Ds.

 

lowlymarine, you shouldn't knock Core 2 like that, you're saying a Core 2 in "this day in age" is like the long line of slowly ramping clock speeds in Pentium 4's. No. Core 2 with the many improvements it's had over the years still delivers excellent performance. NetBurst never did unless it was clocked double that of it's stock speed. Considering a 1.4GHz Williamette Pentium 4 was still beat by a 1.13GHz Coppermine.

 

What 14"-15" laptops will have these new ULV i7 processors? And will they be out by the end of this summer?

 

From past Intel releases, I'd speculate they'd be released in August but you won't get them into your hands until September or later.

 

Intel demos Huron River. Brief video.

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Will I ever be able to buy a laptop? You've been telling me to forget about CPUs for about seven years now.

I'm stuck with a Pentium M. You told me to forget about the Core series, Core Duo, Core 2 Duo, the P-series refresh, and now the i5. I know I've missed a few in there, but it's been about 7 years.

I want to get SB Huron River, but I'm scared you're going to tell me to forget about it two days before it's released and wait for the "next" CPU refresh... haha.

 

Jump in with Sandy bridge, you will be safe through 2013. With a Sandy Bridge notebook you will be able to pop in a quad core Ivy Bridge in place of the SB processor, since after all Ivy Bridge is the shrink of Sandy Bridge to 22nm.

 

Unless Intel makes another new socket.

Im waiting for the new intel notebooks.
Since im more of a gamer, and i know Battlefield Bad Company scales well with multicore cpus (It actually uses most of the cores on my new 6 core AMD cpu) i think a 32nm quad could be the perfect fit as long as they include a powerful ATI HD gpu.
Dont want a mobile toaster Nvidia! (Looks at 480m)

 

Intel demonstrates Sandy Bridge, promises a big performance boost

 

Actually, you're quite right. Lynnfield does out-do Athlon II by a noteworthy margin on power performance, and performance/watt is pretty equal on Phenom II and Bloomfield. Apparently I suck at graphs or something. Mea culpa.

$115 is a sticky price point, especially since the Athlon II x4 635 is only $100 and offers comparable single-threaded performance and vastly superior multi-threaded performance. And it's easy to make the argument that if you're spending $115 anyways, why not spend the extra $25 to step up to the massively faster Phenom II x4 945? And at $200, the i5-750 is $20 more than the Phenom II x4 956 BE, and can rarely if ever match the latter in terms of performance.

Not to mention a random sampling of boards on Newegg shows that Intel boards still run 20-40% more than comparably featured AMD board. And to tie this all back into the whole future platforms thing, it's pretty obvious there's no upgrade path on LGA-1156 anyways, and the price/performance on the LGA-1366 i7s...well, the Phenom II x6 1090T is only $20 more than i7-930 and $250 less than the i7-950, if that tells you anything.

Intel's chips are really fast...but that performance comes at one heck of a cost, and it's a hard one to stomach when you're rarely CPU-limited anyways.

 

Based on this review, the i3-530 is quite close to the X4 630 in many multi-threaded benchmarks (faster in some, in fact), and definitely superior in single-threaded performance. The X4 635 only differs by around 3.6% in clock speed, so it will barely change this situation. Overall, I agree that the AMD CPU is better for the money, but the i3-530 does have advantages like far lower power consumption in its favour.

AnandTech's summary on the i5-750 was "The Core i5 750 is a great processor at $196, in fact, it's the best quad-core CPU you can buy at that price today. In nearly every case it's faster than AMD's Phenom II X4 965 BE, despite the AMD processor costing almost another $50". Granted, the Phenom II X4 965 BE is now $20 cheaper as you've said, which is a testament to AMD's aggressive pricing, but it's still a worse performer overall.

A more interesting offering is AMD's new $200 hexcore, the 1055T; if you're looking for heavily threaded performance above all else it puts AMD in the lead at that price point, though it's weaker for a wider range of tasks.


You're also right about AMD's motherboards generally being cheaper, though I'd have to look at the motherboards I'd actually buy for either platform before I made a purchase.

 

I'm not too impressed with Sandy Bridge. From a performance point of view, I highly doubt that the (more) highly integrated graphics will be able to compete with discrete graphics. I mean sure, it's a nice upgrade for your average laptop user, but this particular direction doesn't seem to have many improvements for high-end users. With those people in mind, what does SB have to offer that current i7 processors don't, besides an improved clockrate and turbo boost?

On the other hand, it is hard to measure the pace of hardware upgrades against software's increased demand for performance. Does the pace of software development really take advantage of these faster processors? One can already make the argument that the i5 520 or 540 is more than sufficient for daily computer operations, in which case, is SB really necessary? I mean sure, increased performance is always a good thing, but if the CPU isn't the bottleneck, it doesn't really do me much good.

 

I'd rather they work on making more aggressive power saving (ie. downclocking/volting, 100-1000MHz GPU) advancements, though it's probably not realistic since they have to separate the standard voltage, LV and ULV chips (ie. GPU for latter is 166-500MHz, LV is 266-566, and standard voltage is 500-766) so they can make more money...

 

They are. Did you not see the articles saying you'll be able to watch to Blu-Ray's on a battery charge. Plus Intel is working on a new thing to power down optical drives (download the Zero Power ODD proposal pdf). Plus check out Wikipedia, though some info may be wrong, Sandy Bridge will have plenty of power improvements:

 

i seriously think sandy bridge might be delayed for laptops.. if intel's already owning AMD now , no point of it owning even more.. i think intel will only release it in Q4 2011 or Q2 2012.. but it does look nice.. also is it going to be backward compatible with i7 quads meaning will i be able to upgrade to sandy bridge processor on a current i7 quad machine?

 

We'll see how fusion pans out, so don't be so quick to dismiss AMD yet.

 

Absolutely not. Sandy Bridge will be released in Q1 2011, possibly in the same manner as Arrandale (i.e. the very beginning of January). Intel is no longer in the position it was last summer (when it delayed Clarksfield for a quarter to let vendors sell off their obsolete Core 2 stock) because AMD is ready to release Llano in H1 2011.

It's not entirely clear yet, but it looks like the answer is no.

 

Sandy Bridge is not backwards compatible with Arrandale. But with a Sandy Bridge laptop you will be able to upgrade it to Ivy Bridge in 2012 (like how Core Duo machines could upgrade to Core 2). And yup, AMD is back in the game. Once Bulldozer Fusion's are out, the battle will really be on!

 

Intel and AMD will make 2011 the year of the laptop.

 

i disagree with u here.. I see AMD in no position at all to threaten intel for a few years.. for example early benchmarks show their quads to a be a joke compared to intel's duals.. IMO , without hyperthreading and better architecture, AMD have no hope in notebooks that is... desktops , different question but quite similar.

 

Sean, BULLDOZER and Bobcat are AMD's future. Where have you been, AMD has been talking about them for a while. AMD is only behind Intel with current cpu's, but come 2011 AMD will be caught up. They will have 32nm Llano for mainstream and 40nm Bobcat for ultraportable/netbooks. Then after Bulldozer will debut which will finally end the K10 architecture's life. You will see AMD's version of hyper-threading plus as well as other great tech. So you are completely WRONG when you say AMD will not threaten Intel for years.

 

Thank you for that post, and this entire thread... I too find it likely that Bulldozer will threaten Intel (especially in servers) in the coming year. I just hope they can get some good quality laptop components out there so as to cause some major competition.

 

It's not about performance, it's about marketing. AMD is all set to market Fusion as if they did something more than just put the CPU and GPU on the same die. Tech savvy people will know that Llano is not much more than a die shrunk Athlon II (which in itself is a crippled Phenom II, a processor first introduced in 2008), but the vast majority will not and AMD will focus on their graphics (which are better than Intel's).

Few people are bottlenecked by their CPUs -- what kept AMD down in the Core 2 days is not that their Turions had inferior performance (although they did), but that they ran very hot and didn't get much battery life. The latter two would be painfully obvious to even the most casual of users and thus only the cheapest laptops made use of them. It won't matter that their processors have the performance Intel had 2 years before as long as they can make something that is cool and power efficient and at 32nm, I think they can (particularly since their main improvement over Athlon II appears to be power gating).

Intel needs to preempt this by releasing Sandy Bridge (which also has the CPU and GPU on the same die) first. I'm fairly certain they'll manage to do this.

That being as it may, they have nothing to do with the laptops Sandy Bridge will be competing with. The first iteration of Bulldozer will be desktop and server only and Bobcat is for netbooks. Laptops get Llano (aka 32nm Athlon II + integrated Evergreen).

 

I have the same question.
I'm off to college this fall and want/need a laptop for it.
I COULD borrow my home 17 inch vaio to make it through the year until 2011 for the Sandy Bridge chips
OR
just buy an envy 14 and wait like 1.5 or 2 years before an upgrade....
OR
buy a cheap dv6t from hp and use that for a year before upgrading to sandy bridge...

This is my biggest dilemna right now.
Like will the performance / feature boost REALLY be worth it?

I'm an occasionally heavy gamer/video editing/coding/and everyday stuff.

You guys are so knowledgable about this Huron River and Sandy Bridge tech compared to me.

 

Sandy Bridge will be a big upgrade over what we have now. It is worth holding out for. Get something cheap for the fall, then by spring as your first year is ending, you can get your Sandy Bridge dream machine. But if you don't wait and get something now, hold onto it until 2013 when the next big upgrade comes in the form of Haswell.

 

i noticed the quad core SB has tdp of 45 whereas duo core SB has tdp of 20

what real world difference in battery life would there be between these two cpus and if it would be worth the performance gain (as i know that most applications don't utilize all 4 cores fully, whatever that means)

 

AVX Instuctions to be BIG

 

Sandy Bridge CPU's Named

Core i3, i5, i7 stay. Here are what desktop processor names will look like:

 

Dang, those are pretty good specs.

 

uh, i5 dont have hyperthread?

 

Looks like they made the i3's the current i5's. And made the i5's into quad core without hyperthreading and i7's quad with hyper-threading. Hmmmm....

 

does this mean mobile i5 will also be quad w/o hyperthreading?

 

More than likely. I'm not complaining since the new i3 would be plenty enough for me.

 

Sandy Bridge won't have delays like Arrandale did:
Cnet
PC World

 

A real i5 quad.
Should perform well, maybe its my new cpu for a Intel desktop rig?

 

I would like the CPU with 4 cores and 8 threads, but I've no doubt that that is going to be the $1000+ model.

 

hehe great post - I feel exactly the same way!

 

Note to Intel.... Don't screw us USB 3.0

 

They have a 4 core, 8 thread CPU NOW for less than a third of that price...

 

So do you guys think the "CPU whine" issue will be resolved with SB? I'm returning my new laptop (which has an Arrandale, i7 620m processor) and sticking with Core 2 Duo because of this issue.

 

Core2s also whine...even Pentium M CPUs did...