Sandy Bridge in nutshell

Last year it was Westmere on 32 nm, this year it is the other part of Tick - Tock cycle and we are prodly looking on new 32 nm Sandy Bridge Architecture.

Sandy Bridge is the successor of Nehalem architecture and the second generation of Core processors. Main goal was to increase the performance and lower the power consumption.
People in Intel have done some serious improvements, when talking about performance in apps and games, added the Advanced Vector Extensions and these processors have no problems with Full HD video and aslo stereoscopic 3D.

Integrated graphics have also overcoma some changes, they lifted up frequency up to 1350 MHz so now you are able to play some game even with integrated chip by what some low-end dedicated graphics are not necessary anymore. These chips can even run games like WoW (MMORPG) and now they finally support DirectX 10.1, OpenGL 3.0 and Shader Model 4.1, according to names these graphics will have six or twelve proccessing unit (6 - HD 2000 in Core i3 and 12 - HD 3000 in Core i5). Until Sandy bridge HD acceleration, encoding of video into MPEG2 and H.264 was dealt with by software, now i tis able to accelerate it the hardware way, which saves a lot of time. Also support of HDMI 1.4 is added.

Intel plans to replace all older processors like Pentium and Celeron to be replaced by Core processors by the end of the year, which is going to bet he end of socket 775. On the beggining just three i7 processors are going to be introduced and the those others. We are going to see a lot more K signs at the end of the processor names, which means unlocked multiplier for overclocking. Sandy Bridge will also bring some changes inside, which means, that integrated graphics, shared L3 cache and memory controller inside the processor. Supported are DDR3 memories, DMI bus with 20 Gb/s flow, PCI-Express 16x and now not only core will be made 32 nm but the whole processor with Uncore on one piece.

Do not get excited, that you will easily just swap your old processor on P55 chipset with these new ones, because new socket LGA 1155 will be introduced, so these are not compatible with the sockets of the last generation. One pro about this can be that you can still cool it with one of your older coolers for LGA 1156.

Also Turbo Boost is in the second generation, which you can see in demo here.

OK so that would bet he Sandy Bridge in a really small nutshell, I am just starting with this whole thing, so I hope you will stay with me and watch the development…so STAY TUNED