Intel Sandy Bridges

I've been trying to find more information on it, but I can't find much. I need to get a laptop within the next couple of months, (maybe mid February is the latest). When is this supposed to come out? I would hate to buy a laptop and miss out on this.

 

The latest word on the web is that it comes out in early January during CES. I believe this to be very likely since there are already reviews of Sandy Bridge out there and Intel's economic reports claim that it has been ramping up production. There will almost certainly be some laptops out by mid-February so you may be able to get what you want.

 

SB laptops will likely be announced at CES, which begins first or second week of January. So expect release of those laptops in the weeks to follow.

 

I still think turbo boost is a mistake. they would have been better off offering core 2 quad w/ hyperthreading + die shrink + lower TDP as far as mobile CPUs are concerned.

 

I'm glad you're not making the decisions for Intel then.

 

Core i7 is still too power hungry to be on a mobile platform. my qx9100 gets the same performance at lower consumption. The integrated memory controller is a big bonus though on the i7. Hopefully sandy bridge will bring down that power consumption.

 

Maybe so, but I can see the point he is making. Turbo boost as you know allows the cores to overclock themselves as heat permits. But I think he has a good point. It might be better to focus more on the mobile space, shrinking die sizes, and less emphasis on clock speed to bring overall heat and power consumption down.
As of late I have turbo boost disabled, but that's because I'm just not comfortable with the cores overclocking themselves. I'd really love to see the day when we can have true silent systems with passive cooling, and turbo boost isn't exactly helping us achieve that.

 

The concept known as 'rush to idle' is where we get more power savings (longer battery life) from a powerful cpu/platform than from an underpowered cpu/platform running top speed all/most of the time (when doing resource intensive work).

Roger, maybe you bought the wrong notebook for your needs?

technos, I too believe that the i7's are too power hungry right now (hence no such system in my arsenal), but Sandy Bridge will definitely address that - while increasing performance too.

 

lets hope this happens before I go off to college in fall 2011 so I can get a proper alienware

 

Nope, my T410 is perfect for my needs.

 

lol thinkpads are made for portability. But I doubt your i7 is more power hungy than my pentium4 thinkpad T30

 

In a Sandy Bridge thread in the Sager Forum I got blasted all to bits for suggesting a 35W TDP Sandy Bridge Quad core. The posters just could not understand why I was wanting a lower power Quad. At least I am not the only one who would like such a beast.

 

Because what we think makes perfect sense, and a lot of people lack common sense. a 30-35W TDP i7 would be killer.

 

Yeah, just because its quad core doesn't mean it needs to run at super fast clock speeds. Now that multithreaded apps are finally becoming more common, you can do a lot more with a lot less clock speed. I'm fine with turbo boost, however, it would be good to give the user some control over its function other than on or off.

I'm anxiously anticipating a new Sandy Bridge laptop most likely with an i7-2720QM and HD 6870. Febraury can't come soon enough!

 

What sort of control do you mean exactly?

Since Sandy TDPs seem to be in-line with Nehalem it will be interesting to see if it does run any cooler than i7-series but really IMO the cooling is down to the notebook manufacturer. Perhaps if TDPs were lowered the laptop manufacturers might just skimp more on the cooling to save a dollar or two in which case you'd still have a not so cool CPU.

 

Nope. That was Intel's maneuver to make the i-series better than the older core 2 duo's in single-threaded performance.

The vast majority of the users still depend on single thread performance (i.e. they don't need multi-cores). And the clock speed is an important issue when it comes to many cores. Otherwise an i7-720QM (runs at 1.6GHz) would be screwed up by (almost) any core 2 duo running a single workload.


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I don't think we're going to see significant power, heat, and TDP drops until Ivy Bridge, personally. By then or Haswell, I think we might be able to see 35W quads with good base clock speeds and Turbo Boost. Basically, I think that a die shrink will be enough for us to have our cake and eat it too.

 

Turbo boost is great, I don't know what's not to like about it. It's barely at work when you use all 4 cores (though Sandy Bridge is supposed to change that) but it allows your lower clocked quad CPU not to be crushed by a random dual core on stuff that's not heavily multi-threaded. Off/On is perhaps limiting but I think you either need the extra performance or you don't.

I can understand the need for quad-cores with lower TDP (there's always the ULV/LV stuff for dual), but current 45W i7 have really low clocks, so low that in many apps they get beaten by the higher clocked dual i5/i7. Sure they could have released quad CPUs with the same speed & lower TDP with 45nm shrunk to 32nm, instead they decided to bump their clock speed up.

And it's not exactly true that Sandy keeps the same 45W TDP, because now there's the IGP in it, though I don't know how much it accounts for.

 

My thread has all the info you need.

 

The IGP probably won't account for much since most quad core laptops will have a dedicated graphics card and disable the IGP, most likely.

 

You got blasted because you suggested that Intel cripple the top end quad-core CPUs by putting a cap on total performance in order to lower TDP, and refused to understand that you could instead get the performance you want at the TDP you want just by buying a lower model dual-core CPU.

 

I'm in the market for a new laptop now, as the video card on the one in my sig died on me after 3 years, and am debating whether to go ahead and get one or wait for Sandy bridge. Is it worth the wait? I'd hate to wait 4 months for nothing. What are the main benefits? Is it that much faster? Can someone lay it out for me?

 

I was wondering that too.

 

Again... performance depends on your uses. If you surf the internet, check email and even game, you won't see a difference with these new processors. I suggest creating a new thread in the what notebook to buy forum and fill out the FAQ if you're currently looking for a notebook (or want to know if waiting will benefit you).

 

What I'm looking forward to the most is USB 3 and SATA 6. Whomever comes out with support for both natively first will get my money (Intel or AMD).

 

I can’t help but to laugh at your statement that I suggested Intel cripple the top end Quad. You know as well as me that Intel could cut 10W of TDP and these would still be the most powerful laptop processors available, period. How can you use the word cripple to describe that? I am not denying at all that I wanted lower power quads, I fully understood you could just get a lower end processor, but again no one would acknowledge these processors still would be faster and more powerful than the current generation. That is why I was so obstinate to not budge on my statement.

I see arguments around here all the time about how Nvidia has way overpriced, power hungry, hot running high end GPU’s, compared to AMD. The same can be said of Intel processors.

 

My thread has all the info you need.

 

Ah, but the TDP accounts for the entire chip, not for what happens when you disable parts of it. Thus, the 45W quad-cores are probably more like 35W if you use a discreet GPU.

 

Probably not so low as 35W but if you look at current i5/i7 dual-cores it's pretty clear that despite having the same TDP as P Core2Duo they consume noticeably less, without the turbo boost active (then it distorts the whole picture).

 

Actually, they consume more power than the C2D series, as evident by decreased battery life with similar models (ie. Dell Latitude E6400 -> E6410).

 

+1, I thought this was the general consensus. When the 920xm came out several reviews showed it was indeed as fast or faster than the qx9300, but battery life was shortened and it put out more heat.

Core 2's are still the most efficient low-power chips, as proof look to what Apple uses in their lower-end models like the Macbook 13" and Air.

 

AFAIK this should come under the IPS ( Intelligent Power Sharing). If the GPU isn't doing much it leaves more power for the CPU to use and vice-versa.

 

If the IGP is disabled, the TDP stays the same. All it really means is that it can Turbo Boost more often since the IGP and CPU limit eachother's ability to reach max TB.

 

Actually, they use them because the Arrendale IGP is too weak.

 

I remember quite well some tests that showed arrandale notebooks had an overall better battery life if it weren't for the turbo boost kicking in, therefore depending on whether you ran a lot of CPU intensive apps or just some random stuff like web-browsing it had an edge or not.