Wednesday, September 15, 2010
Intel's Sandy Bridge CPU architecture is set to hit mainstream PCs by 2011 and it will be known as 2nd Generation Core. The improvements over the current mainstream Core i7 series CPUs largely relate to media processing. The graphics processor and I/O components have been integrated onto the same piece of silicon as the CPU itself, and improvements have been made to Turbo Boost and power management.
Sandy Bridge uses a 32nm manufacturing process and packs in more than 1 billion transistors. It has four CPU cores, an integrated graphics controller and a system agent that includes a two-channel memory controller, a PCI Express controller (1x 16 or 2x 8 lanes), the connection to the south bridge (DMI) and a DisplayPort controller. All of these parts have been designed from scratch to be integrated on the same die rather than on separate dies in within the same package. This differs from the design of the current Core processors in which the CPU, graphics and memory controllers are in the same physical package, but located on separate pieces of silicon.
One of the benefits of having all of the CPU's components on the same die is that power sensors can rapidly change the way that power flows to and from those components, thereby lowering the overall power consumption of the chip. The graphics controller and the four CPU cores have their own variable power planes, but the system agent has a fixed, low-voltage power plane. The display agent has been taken out of the graphics controller and put into the system agent. Because of this, the graphics adapter can be put into a sleep state when all a laptop is doing is displaying images from a frame buffer onto a screen. In previous designs where the display agent was located in the graphics controller, the graphics controller could not be powered down in such a scenario.
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