Intel demos next-next-gen 'Sandy Bridge' chip

Posted on 23 Sep 2009 at 18:06

Intel CEO Paul Otellini has showed that the first 'Sandy Bridge' silicon is already back in Intel's labs and happily runs Windows 7 and simple video encoding tasks. Apparently, it's been back in the labs for about a month.

'Sandy Bridge' is Intel's next-generation micro architecture and is based on Intel's 32nm process.

Otellini stopped short of giving any details on core counts or clock frequencies - they'll be saved for a later date. 'Sandy Bridge' does introduce some new CPU instructions, though, which all fall under the AVX instruction set.

This is a 256-bit instruction set extension to SSE and is designed for applications that are floating point intensive, such as multimedia, scientific and financial applications.

Given that Intel will be shipping its first 32nm 'Westmere' processors later this year, we're expecting to see the company introduce the first 'Sandy Bridge' chips towards the end of next year.

Author: Tim Smalley in San Francisco

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