No new Quad Core CPUs 'till Sandy Bridge?

I have heard that Arrandale (32nm shrink of Nehalem) will be dual-core only, with a crappy 45nm GPU in the same package! Arrandale is set to come out in Early 2010 I've heard.

Well, then that means that Sandy Bridge is the next architecture beyond Calpella, which would update the quad core mobile processors.

I believe that this is correct in that the i7 920qm is the fastest and latest quad core processor that we can hope for until late into 2010? I am hoping that Intel updates this current generation, but that would generally mean more heat unless they would optimize the architecture to offset the additional clockrate.


Who knows, AMD might release Champlain (3-core CPU Mobile) before Intel's Sandy Bridge..

Am I wrong (I hope)?
What is the estimated release time for Sandy Bridge, I am hearing different times.

 

yep, no more quadcores until sandy bridge

clarksfield and arrandale are MEANT to live alongside one another. arrandale is for lower-end computing with higher battery life, whereas clarksfield is the brute-strength, results-first, 8-thread strong processors.

i do believe sandy bridge is VERY ahead of schedule and should be out by the end of 2010.

 

Sandy Bridge is very healthy and while it is probable that Intel can release Sandy Bridge cores in limited quantity to niche markets(like Extreme Editions) early as middle of next year, I highly doubt they will do that due to various factors.

Internally, they seem to already have marketshare projections of near future processors(including Sandy Bridge) and profits for Sandy Bridge is all coming in early 2011(Jan/Feb I mean). One of the reasons Calpella was delayed was due to vendor interaction. The retailers wanted their inventory of Montevina platform cleared before bringing in Calpella.

The Q1 2011 date also enables Intel to release nearly all Sandy Bridge-derivatives at a similar time, rather than having a significant gap with Nehalem which isn't exactly nice for profit margins.

I do expect to see some more models of 4 core CPUs for Calpella however. I see it quite unlikely they'll release nothing for entire year between Clarksfield and Sandy Bridge. If anything, the most important market for them is notebooks.

But the reality is:
Clarksfield: The pricey laptop CPU that not many will buy and is almost purely for bragging rights(for Intel)
Arrandale: The REAL laptop CPU that will feature integrated graphics and low power benefitting far more users.

 

clarksfield is a workhorse. you can definitely expect people using clarksfield in their mobile workstation.

also...*looks over at alienware* -_-

 

Calpella is not the architecture, it is the platform. Sandy Bridges platform is codenamed "Huron River". There might be a shrink of Clarksfield to 32nm and maybe some faster clocked versions since Huron River won't be out until late 2010 or early 2011, or maybe not. We will see.

 

With Westmere, Intel is also muscling Nvidia and ATI chipsets out of the market.

 

Not true at all. With Arrandale, all laptops will be able to use switchable graphics.

From Serg's guide:

 

Well, the architecture is x86-64 right? The PC architecture is always being tweaked, whether at the chipset level or inside the main Microprocessor .. or something along those lines.

Calpella / Sandy Bridge =platform
Clarksfield / Arrandale = CPU of Calpella platform
A shrink of Clarksfield would be sweet!

 

If we could put an Arrandale chip in the Asus G51j, then switchable graphics? It would then be a matter of the Nvidia 260 to properly shut down when the primary_activated GPU is onboard. I am picturing a huuggee jump in battery life, but you'd be stuck with dual core all the time.

We will see.

 

Calpella is platform on the Nehalem architecture of which Westmere is the shrink. Clarksfield and Arrandale are the processors on the Calpella platform and Huron River is the platform on the Sandy Bridge architecture.

 

what does that have to do with anything?

discrete cards will work regardless of who provides the chipset.

 

It is from a slide from IDF saying that Arrandale will basically allow every notebook to have switchable graphics, and Intel is not muscling Nvidia and ATI out. Maybe with chipsets, but not with the graphics cards.

 

Agreed, Intel's not trying to muscle out Nvidia and ATI just yet with Arrandale - the real muscling out will come with Larrabee.

I imagine that Intel will offer Larrabee to OEMs for an unbeatably low price as part of some sort of Centrino-style package, except targeted towards gamers.

But until then, Nvidia and ATI should be just fine. After all, Nvidia doesn't have anything that directly competes with Intel's 4500M(HD) right now, and ATI only has similar products for AMD-based systems so Arrandale's in-package IGP doesn't really change the status quo.

 

Yes, completely true. When I say that Intel is muscling ATI and Nvidia chipsets out of the market, I'm talking about their actual chipsets with integrated graphics, not their discrete gpu's.

 

I have also heard that Intel may delay Sandy Bridge, to ensure that the lifecycle of Calpella (and desktop variant) I guess get their time on the market. I sure wish that AMD was a competitor in the high-end mobile market.. they have a 3-core Mobile platform/architecture named Champlain, which will come out sometime next year I bet.

I appreciate the i7 architecture as it is in the mobile sector. It has very good performance with parallelism. However, for real-world responsiveness, single-threaded performance is a key aspect.. and the 920qm core running @ 3.2GHZ w/TurboBoost wouldn't be that much faster than a overclocked 3.06GHZ X9100 (provided that Calpella is not overclockable?? Which I have not found information about yet), say running at 3.45GHZ. I'm sure the 920qm would edge out, but by how much?

And the 920qm might not work in non 12 pound laptops (G51j, HP Envy 15", ...), we will see if the BIOS allows it when the modders start voiding their warranties!

 

the nehalem CPU would simply beat the living crap out of core2q.

the architectural improvements are quite hardcore(primarily the removal of the FSB).

 

Not really. The performance is relatively close.

Removing the FSB isn't that big of a deal. AMD did it 5 years ago, and Intel could have done it if they wanted to.

I'm not saying nehalem isn't better than penryn, but it isn't anything drastic.

 

the G51j is marked as 6.5lbs, .7lbs less than its non- i7 predecessor the G51VX, and the 920XM is listed as an available option on the reseller sites.

 

I think we are beyond that point now. Now the per-core performance becoming important. Modern apps hardly use only 1 thread nowadays(even games!). The improved multi-thread scaling and better interprocessor communications Nehalem has is pretty much relevant now.

This reviews shows majority of the modern apps use 4 cores: http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/cpu-cores-performance,2373.html

Which would make comparison between dual core X9100 and quad core-anything pretty much moot.

 

Many applications have > than 1 thread, but they cannot branch out and do work on separate cores at the same time. This has something to do with the 'parent' thread of the program and how it gives tasks to the other threads and how those threads communicate with it, or something .. I'm not a CS major yet.

For instance, Firefox 3.5. To this day it will only use 1 processor, even with 50 tabs open. This is a huge bottleneck when restoring all tabs at once.

Explorer.exe in Windows 7 64-bit; One 1 core. You can see this by opening up Task Manager (making sure the 'taskmgr.exe' process it running in "Realtime" priority to ensure it gets enough clock cycles), and selecting 'explorer.exe'
and then hold down the start menu key on the keyboard and then pressing 'e' as fast as you can, telling Explorer to open up new Explorer windows.

You will notice it peaks at ~50% CPU usage on a dual core machine.


Fox-it Reader 2.2 : Only uses one core to render, which proves to be a bottleneck with PDFs that have a huge amount of vector images to render.


Microsoft Word 2007: when copying the contents of a large web site, or other data into the clipboard, and then pasting it into a word document, if you have enough data for it to categorize and format, it will take many seconds, and you can see that disk I/O is not a bottleneck, and 'WINWORD.exe'is begged at 50% CPU usage on a dual processor system.

That is about all I could come up with so far. I do agree that eventually this won't be as large of an issue as software is updated to take advantage.

 

all I know is that I want/need an SU or SLU quad core with Vt running around 1.4 Gz.

For my mix of apps, four (or more??) moderately clocked cores is better than a pair of faster cores.

 

SU Quad-Core (virtual included) is Arrandale.
I know, Arrandale has 2 cores but 4 threads. It acts as a quad core, consumes less and allows switchable.

Now, about the chipsets+arrandale. NVIDIA and Intel are in war on that (lawsuit after lawsuit) due to NVIDIA not being (supposedly) able to support the Arrandale chips (or any other with integrated graphic controller) so NVIDIA stopped production/development of their chipsets.
ATI Chipsets dont support Intel, period.

ATI GPU and NVIDIA GPU can both go with the Arrandale and be switchable.

Arrandale has both the CPU and IGP inside, so theoretically it should work if plugged (some updates on drivers should be done).

 

The i7's hyperthreading will never work as well or as efficiently as a true core.

 

There we agree. But that is the closest a true ultraportable will be to a quad core on these times.

 

I'd expect a 2.66GHz Arrandale without Turbo Mode should be able to outperform the Q9000 even in heavy multi-threaded apps. That's pretty much saying its like a quad core(but last gen of course). It might even get ahead of Q9100 with Turbo Mode.

 

Interesting, but I'll reserve judgements when I actually see it.