Skip Arranadle And Hold Out For Sandy Bridge?

While I have been highly impressed by what arrandale is bringing to the notebook segment on the intel platforms this year, I’m still bugged out by intel's decision to postpone the super CRITICAL USB 3.0 AND SATA 6GB support on the new 5 series chipsets! Support for these two will almost certainly arrive with sandy bridge early next year but 12 months is a horribly long time to wait.

To be honest, Im bothered more by the absence of SATA 6 than usb 3.0, and there's one simple reason for this: SSD 's! No tech is advancing as quickly as SSD technology on the notebook or desktop arena at the moment and current SSd's are already beginning to saturate the SATA 3 interface- particularly for burst speeds and access times. Now I don’t what to get left out in the cold when it comes to upgrade paths to the very fast ssd’s that will be commonplace by 2011/12 when I will probably be doing a mid-life upgrade of my rig. SSd will amost certainly represent the biggest single performance upgrade one can make, especially if migrating from a good old hdd, which I will be, since I have no plans to buy an ssd at current prices. Guess what? All the best ssd’s be using SATA6 by 2011/12. So I’ve got a problem.

Now I know there are some rickety implementations out there being tried by various oems using pci express lanes, but these are almost always very sub-optimal and could give compatibility problems with newer SSD controllers in the future. You can be sure that all SSD controllers are heavily tested for compatibility with intel chipsets but the same cant be said for an NEC or a VIA soulution that poaches the pci-express lanes. For that reason im tempted to pass this generation over (im still running an intel merom chip by the way) and hold out for sandy bridge plus intel 6 series mobile chipset, which barring a miracle should tick all the boxes:

32nm quad core with monolithic dx 10/11 igp
Sandy bridge with new AVX instructions
256bit data path (up from 128 bits- will be an FP monster)

Intel should have got it right and shipped usb 3.0 and sata6 this year.

I know you can play the waiting game forever, but next years platform will be a hell of lot more FUTUREPROOF than this years!

Dont get me wrong arrandale represents a great step forward, but frankly, it is severly handicapped by a few key ommissions at the chipset level.

 

just do what ever you want. i get an i5 next week and will love it. and i sure get something sandy bridge based when it's out, too..

 

Maybe OEM's will include some third party mods to include SATA 3 and USB 3.0?

 

I don't hold out on things unless they are in the near future. I wouldn't wait an entire year for this

 

I buy a computer when I need it and the deal is right. I'm not watching Intel's roadmap....

Actually, to be more honest, I buy computers all the time, also when I don't need them

 

This isn't by any means certain, but since you are looking so far, there might be a chance of USB 3.0/SATA3-600 Arrandale refresh by middle of this year.

 

I'm doing the same thing; Waiting for Sandy Bridge. Though in my case, this applies to a desktop, rather than a notebook.

Intel is delaying adoption of SATA 6 and USB 3.0 for a reason: They have their own connection technology coming out by 2011 called Lightpeak. Yes, it's a bad move to delay the adoption of new technologies for half the computer market for what I'm sure is going to be for Intel's own licensing profit, but wouldn't you rather not waste your money on supporting these potentially short-lived/redundant standards when Intel's new technology is going to provide a theoretical 1000Gbps, compared to SATAIII's 6Gbps and USB 3.0's 4.8Gbps?

Honestly, the best solution I can give you is to purchase a Desktop, not a Notebook, because worst case scenario, you will always be able to add on USB 3.0 or a SATAIII PCI-e card.

This year is going to be a bit confusing for consumers. We've basically got yet another format war, but this time it's over cable standards.