Sandy Bridge

The Gift

Sandy Bridge is the codename for the processor microarchitecture developed by Intel as the successor to Nehalem. Development began in 2005 and was entirely developed in Intel's research center located at Haifa - Israel. Sandy Bridge uses the same 32 nm manufacturing process as Westmere.
It is set to be announced on January 5, 2011 during Consumer Electronics Show (CES) 2011, after which the first batch of mainstream processors will be launched. Click here for the roadmap.

The former codename Gesher (Hebrew for "bridge") was abandoned on April 17, 2007, according to Justin Rattner's keynote at the Spring 2007 Intel Developer Forum. A preview of the Core i5 2300 (2.8GHz) has been shown to be 17% faster than a Core i5 760 (2.8GHz) in CineBench R11.5 64-bit.

Overclocking of Socket-1155 compatible processors through modifying the default 100 MHz base clock speed is very limited, probably to about only 2–3% at most, due to the factory integrating a single clock generator to control the speed of all electrical buses. Hence, the base clock (BCLK) of the clock generator has to be kept close to the default 100 MHz base clock to prevent other hardware components from failing to work. However, Intel will allow overclocking through modifying the unlocked clock multiplier of up to 57 times the speed of base clock, which will be available in K-edition processors.

Reported on September 15, 2010: An Overclocking of the Sandy Bridge architecture appeared in an article by ZDNet. Their Core i7-2600K processor sample (where the "K" indicates the processor has an unlocked multiplier, allowing for overclocking) was able to operate at 4.9 GHz using an air-cooled solution. This has gained some attention due to the fact that achieving 4.9 GHz typically requires water or better cooling. Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking has refuted that it probably was not an accurate performance demo, saying "not a demo where the system was stressing all cores and threads, and it was not a statement confirming this could be maintained for 24×7 operation." Liquid Nitrogen Overclocking has shown instances of an Core i7-2600K processor operating at 4.5 GHz on a Gigabyte P67A-UD7 (no graphics) motherboard, and a Core i5-2500K processor operating at 4.2 GHz using a Gigabyte H67MA-UDH2 motherboard. All other details are still unknown.

Intel Sandy Bridge E Processors are to come with an unlocked base clock. There are also rumors about a Z68 Chipset that came with what was referred to as “Performance Over Clocking” support.

An initial preview of a Sandy Bridge processor, with A1 stepping at 2GHz, was shown at the fall 2009 Intel Developer Forum. Sandy Bridge is confirmed to have a stepping of D2.

Intel has stated that Sandy Bridge processors will include a new set of instructions known as Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX). These instructions are an advanced form of SSE. The data path is widened from 128 bits to 256 bits, the two-operand instruction limit is increased to three operands, and advanced data rearrangement functions are included. AVX is suited for floating-point-intensive applications. New features include mask loads, data permutes, increased register efficiency and use of parallel loads, as well as smaller code size. When AVX instruction is used in conjunction with these improvements, it provides double peak FLOPS performance compared to using SSE4 instructions on CPUs. Sandy Bridge will also have a new extensible VEX opcode prefix.

In addition, Sandy Bridge processors will implement security features that include the ability to remotely disable a PC or erase information from hard drives. This can be useful in the case of a lost or stolen PC. The commands can be received through 3G signals, ethernet, or internet connections. AES encryption will be available for both video conferencing and VoIP applications.