While already pre-announced in fall (think of Intel as opposite of Apple in keeping its plans secret), Intel is due to officially announce and ship "Sandy Bridge" versions of its CPUs. This is half-step improvement over current line as is typical of Intel's development roadmap.
Noteworthy is hitting a transistor count of 1 billion for a mass market CPU. To give you some perspective, one of my beloved computers, the original Apple II, had a CPU with just 3,000 transistors!
Intel forecasts that in a decade, we would hit 10 billion transistors!
Some of the nice things happening is a much faster graphics processor (GPU) which now like the CPU, increases and decreases its clock speed as to save power when not in use, but generate more performance when in use. It is also able to share in the "CPU cache" which is a fancy way of saying it can access memory much faster. All up, this should give a decent boost to this subsystem. While its performance will still be nothing to write home about compared to stand-alone graphics cards when it comes to gaming, it is still nice to see the decent boost and power saving aspects.
The new line will come in bewildering number of variations for mobile and desktop, making your head spin trying to figure out which is which. Another thing Intel keeps doing to confuse customers.
Last year, Intel was good at announcing and shipping parts at CES. Assuming the same happens this time on January 5th, if you are in the market for a new computer, you might want to wait a couple of weeks.
Noteworthy is hitting a transistor count of 1 billion for a mass market CPU. To give you some perspective, one of my beloved computers, the original Apple II, had a CPU with just 3,000 transistors!
Intel forecasts that in a decade, we would hit 10 billion transistors!
Some of the nice things happening is a much faster graphics processor (GPU) which now like the CPU, increases and decreases its clock speed as to save power when not in use, but generate more performance when in use. It is also able to share in the "CPU cache" which is a fancy way of saying it can access memory much faster. All up, this should give a decent boost to this subsystem. While its performance will still be nothing to write home about compared to stand-alone graphics cards when it comes to gaming, it is still nice to see the decent boost and power saving aspects.
The new line will come in bewildering number of variations for mobile and desktop, making your head spin trying to figure out which is which. Another thing Intel keeps doing to confuse customers.
Last year, Intel was good at announcing and shipping parts at CES. Assuming the same happens this time on January 5th, if you are in the market for a new computer, you might want to wait a couple of weeks.
