Forget Huron River, 22nm Ivy Bridge on the Way

Let me condense that for you. (or, for us laptop owners specifically interested in differntiating sb and ib, aside from the obvious cpu-specific changes)

• Focus on efficiency
• Light Peak integration
• USB 3.0
• DirectX 11 enabled gpu w/ 24 Shaders

I heard that IB power efficiency to SB would be what SB will be to (45nm?) chips today. So if laptops are going to go from 2 to 4 hrs use time with SB, I would guess they might reach 6 hrs in-use time in 2012. I want to know how revolutionary this power efficiency is going to be, might be worth the wait if you're sitting on a computer that doesn't feel unusably old already.

I can understand lightpeak and usb 3.0 coming together, but at the same time it makes the upgrade path to lightpeak really long. Intuitively, if intel wanted the change, rahter than just supporting speculative markets, it would only have lightpeak.

 

Good news. Right now I plan on SB in Feb/March whenever a decent machine is available that meets my needs, and then Haswell about same time in 2013. Sounds like there's some significant advances in power consumption. Good news.

 

I am forgetting SB as per instructions and also forgetting Huron River.

When a new thread in a few months comes out instructing me to forget Ivy Bridge, I will once again comply.

I hope and pray that one day I will be able to own a laptop.

 

Meh. Forget computers; brain chips are on the way!

 

That made me LOL Waiting never stops!!!

 

Intel has said (somewhere, I was looking the past ten minutes but I cant find it with google) that as die shrinks continue past 32nm, it is about the integrated parts of the chip, and power efficiency, not about the cpu anymore. From that perspective, the bulk of improvements are expected to come from on-die mem controller, pci controller, video, tesselation (3d video), ray trace ... the bulk of these things are already on board with SB. So from that perspective, don't wait for IB, get your laptop next year.

The nieche sectors, what people waiting for IB are probably happy owners of new-ish laptops already, or else they are really, really desperate for raided sf2000 class SSDs, or high end SLI, or looong battery life/usefully powerful ultraportables.

 

I have just the opposite thought and would wait for Ivy Bridge, for the following reasons:

1. quad core would be standard in notebook
2. USB 3.0/LightPeak may also be a standard feature in the chipset
3. same goes for SATA3
4. SSD will again see a newer generation

In other words, some of the key things for the next 5 years or so will be available as standard features in the Ivy Bridge generation.

 

I thought SATA3 comes with SB. A lot of notebooks have USB 3.0 ports ; mobile quad cores are already available even if they are quite expensive, but I suspect they'll be cheaper with SB.

I'll buy SB in a few months, hoping by that time Mr Bernanke and his Epson Stylus hasn't already destroyed the dollar, causing global unspeakable disaster that'll affect new CPUs developement as well.

 

Not standard, mainstream. And Ivy is not that much ahead of Sandy in that respect since it is a continuum. The first mobile quad-cores were downright exotic. They came towards the end of Core 2's reign, they were power hungry and expensive and they suffered from the flaw of all pre-Turbo quad-cores (because the overwhelming majority of tasks were not heavily multi-threaded, they were usually worse than dual-cores outside of benchmarks).

The second generation (Clarksfield) was still expensive and power hungry, but at least it tried to get around the flaw using Turbo Boost. Relatively low clock speeds were its downfall: unless you went for the really expensive parts, the dual-cores were still competitive in most scenarios.

Sandy Bridge will be the third generation and from what is currently available, it looks like it will be substantially cheaper, more power efficient and it's definitely clocked higher. Quad-cores won't quite be mainstream, but they'll be pretty close. Ivy is just the natural extension of that -- they'll be even cheaper and even more common to the extent where Intel is comfortable calling them mainstream.

Incidentally, the same thing goes for USB 3.0, SATA3 and SSDs: all of these will be available with Sandy Bridge, but they'll be cheaper and more prevalent with Ivy. Light Peak is a wild card -- nobody really know what is going on with that (rumor has it the new MacBooks may come out with it in April).

 

Forget Ivy Bridge, 16nm Rockwell =p

 

uEFI might also start getting pretty standard by ivy bridge. Here's a H67 mainboard for the desktop market with it: Gigabyte GA-H67MA-UD2H Intel H67 Motherboard First Look - PCSTATS.com my bad, wrong one. this one: pt site with upcoming ASRock Fatality mobo

edit: Sandy bridge apparently is when uEFI will start hitting mainstream. Intel UEFI with Sandy Bridge.

 

Don't forget we have Haswell in between Ivy Bridge and Rockwell.

 

Intel puts GPU memory on Ivy Bridge

 

Sounds a lot like eDRAM....granted the impressive stacking process does give it 100x the memory that ATI's GPU uses in the XBox 360.

 

Very interesting. The most obvious problem with integrated graphics regardless of architecture (i.e. Intel, AMD and Nvidia all have it) has always been memory bandwidth. I thought that they'd solve it by adding more channels, but it looks like Intel has found a more direct way to do it. If they can pull this off and double the number of "execution units", they'll be moving into the territory of mid-range laptop cards.

 

Tock phases are my favorite

I hope so but I bet they won't be lol

 

that GPU article on ivy bridge is interesting. it got me thinking ...with SB IGP, I should be planning my memory reqs around the IGP as well.
instead of 3.5 GB min for windows 7 (2.5G to not use swap, +1GB for apps), now I need 4.25 GB :S

 

Do they still take memory from the OS ? That article sounds like it is in a sense having its own memory.

Anyway, I would get at least 6GB+ for any new notebook.

 

Yeah.. I don't really know that it would use all the memory available to it in RAM, but it does use some RAM. Graphics drivers allocate the RAM on discreet graphics cards, but on integrated graphics the only buffer is actual RAM. How much free RAM the intel drivers will dispose themselves of is a different question ... but optimistically they would take all they can reasonably use. The AMD 5450 is supposed to be just a hair underpowered in comparison, and it needs a minimum of 512MB.

My point was the same as yours though, after a fashion .. you need more than 4GB with Sandy Bridge -- but I would go further and say that you don't really with Ivy Bridge (!)

 

My rule of thumb is simple, # of core x 2GB

so when I get my Ivy Bridge(would skip Sandy), I would pair it with 8GB(as even entry level Ivy would be quad) may be a little more depending on the price then.

 

Just out of curiosity, why would cores determine how much memory you use? They seem pretty independent. They make high end dual cores, you know. I think something like # of cores * 2MB L2 Cache makes more sense.

Or for RAM, maybe something like how many cores you would actually use * 2GB. People with quadcores using their notebooks just for web browsing/word processing probably aren't going to touch anything beyond 3GB or so of used RAM.
With the pagefile off.
On Windows Vista.
Using Internet Explorer.
With McAfee installed.

 

That is why I said, my simple rule of thumb, not some scientific thing

Basically, I see each core as an independent computer and I just equip each with what I think the desired(my) amount of RAM to each.

 

Question:

Will the performance between a standard Dual-Core Sandy Bridge and a standard Quad-Core Ivy Bridge be noticeable? Will it be as drastic as when mainstream computers went from Single-Core to Dual-Cores in 2006ish?

I ask this because I am looking to get the x201 refresh when it comes out with Sandy Bridge, and I heard most likely Ivy Bridge won't be out until Q1 2012, so I may just go with Sandy Bridge and then sell the x201 refresh once Ivy Bridge becomes readily available.

 

I see. To each their own I suppose! There are many worse ways one could decide on RAM

 

There shouldn't be a huge difference in just the processor speed. We'll probably gain a new instruction set or two, and of course the power requirements will drop, and the IGP will improve.

My thoughts are, if you're going to wait for Ivy Bridge, you almost might as well wait for Haswell at that point. Unless you just bought a laptop recently or are waiting for USB 3.0/Lightpeak, Sandy Bridge is the way to go.

 

is it already officially confirmed that ib will be backward compatible with sb?

 

Slippery slope with the waiting game, cause then Rockwell will be out then god knows what.

 

I'm not buying another laptop until at leaaaast 2016. By then rockwell's successors will be out and we'll have 12 core laptops with 64gB of ram =p

 

I think I'll wait until 2020 because we'll probably be plugged into our brains by then.

 

lol I picked 2016 since I buy a new computer about once every 6 years =p

 

That's a good policy to go by. I just don't see the sense in running out and buying a new computer every 6 months or a year any more.

 

These companies should forget about the money and read more about the paradox of choice. I'm sick of this, will I ever buy a notebook!

 

Me either =p perhaps an upgrade for a part once in a while but a whole new rig? Nah.

 

Intel likely to outsource Panther Point chipsets to TSMC, say sources

 

Cause, I mean, it worked well for NVidia and AMD, right? Watch Ivy Bridge still be 32nm.

 

Ivy Bridge is probably too far along in development for that to to happen, and anyway Ivy Bridge is "just" a die shrink for the most part. If it's still 32nm, then it becomes a very minor Sandy Bridge update.

 

They have not outsourced the cpu production. Its just the chipset. I would think current chipsets use 65nm. So a 40nm chipset from TSMC would be great for Ivy Bridge.

 

That last part was a joke, guys.

 

should have said watch ivy bridge chipset beeing canceled all together and the cpu just use the 65 nm current sandy bridge chipset

 

Sandy Bridge = 65 nm?
errr, no

 

He's talking about the chipset, which is 65nm.

 

oh ok never mind

 

anyone seen this? Intel zeigt 22 nm-CPU mit acht Kernen - News - Hardware-Infos



that's 16 cores in an ivy bridge, if I'm not mistaken

 

according to the article i'd say 8 and 16 MB of cache

 

Unless I've forgotten all my German, "acht" is eight and Kernen probably is kernels/cores.

 

Acht is eight, and kernen is cores.

 

Does it say anything about 8 cores in the mobile chips or is it just for desktops?

 

That's the die shot of the 22nm SRAM dies in the test wafer.

Each die has
->2.9 billion transistors
-364Mbit array size(45.5MB)

SRAM is the memory type used in CPU's caches.

 

Theres always something better around the corner


I think the main thing about Ivy bridge that I would like over Sandy Bridge is that it has a programmable shader GPU, unlike SB's primitive fixed function GPU. ATI/Nvidia moved away from fixed function years ago. Other than that, Ivy Bridge will be largely evolutionary, not revolutionary.

 

That's wrong, Intel's previous GPUs were doing too much in the EU, Sandy Bridge brings that on par with AMD/Nvidia. HD Graphics does triangle setup on the EU, and ones before that did clip/cull in the EU. AMD/Nvidia graphics have fixed function units for both of them.