Intel announced their 2nd generation Sandy Bridge mobile and desktop processors for CES 2011 with includes details of its new Core i3, i5, and i7 processors and 29 new CPUs in total as well as new integrated graphics options.The 2nd Generation Core Processor have the horse power to play HD movies, encode HD video faster and stream protected 1080p HD content wirelessly to a remote display……
The new chips offer a boost in energy-efficient performance according to Intel with on-chip graphics and new Advanced Vector Extension (AVX) instructions to accelerate multimedia handling, offering a 2x gain in performance over current chips.To be officially announced at CES in Las Vegas, the Sandy Bridge chips make up a slew of new Core i7, i5 and i3 processors with the quad-core Core i7 models due to ship first, Intel said. Various vendors are expected to showcase upcoming systems based on the new chips at the show.
At the top-end of the range is the mobile i7-2920XM, a quad-core Extreme Edition processor with a base frequency of 2.5GHz, but which can rise to 3.5GHz when necessary using Intel’s updated Turbo Boost technology.The rest of the line-up consists of 12 new standard Core i7 chips, 12 Core i5 and four Core i3 models covering both desktop and laptop systems in dual-core and quad-core versions.
Sandy Bridge is a completely new processor architecture manufactured on Intel’s 32nm fabrication technology.The new architecture has been designed to deliver significant advances in visual and 3D graphics capabilities.With re-designed on-chip graphics circuitry that shares the same L3 cache as the processor cores.These include Advanced Vector Extension (AVX) instructions which process floating-point calculations in 256-bit chunks to accelerate image, video and audio processing.
AVX is not supported in current versions of Windows and users will require the yet to be released Windows 7 Service Pack 1 to make use of this feature, Intel said.Sandy Bridge also has Intel Quick Sync Video, hardware acceleration features for transcoding video between formats, offering a doubling of performance when authoring video files, according to Intel.Intel’s Turbo Boost has also been given an overhaul on the Core i7 and i5 chips enabling greater flexibility in when it can kick in and rack up the clock speed to boost performance.Sandy Bridge chips also feature up to 8MB of on-chip cache, an on-chip memory controller supporting dual channels for DDR3 memory up to 1600MHz.
New Features :
- Intel Quick Sync Video – The title of this one isn’t exactly the most self explanatory, but Intel’s promising way faster video transcoding with it’s new integrated Quick Sync feature, which does encoding in hardware — it says it will be 17x faster than older generations of integrated graphics. Intel’s partnered with media software companies like CyberLink, Corel, and ArcSoft to enable this hardware-accelerated H.264 and MPEG-2 video conversion.
- Intel InTru 3D / Clear Video HD – 3D Blu-ray playback over HDMI 1.4? Not a problem for Intel’s Core 2011 platform. This doesn’t mean Intel’s providing the 3D technology for laptops or desktops, but it’s promising that you can play stereoscopic 3D and HD content on your TV using HDMI.
- WiDi 2.0 – Our biggest complaints about the original WiDi was the lack of support for 1080p. Well, Intel’s finally enabled streaming of full HD with its latest processors. There’s still lag and you will need to pick up a new TV receiver, most likely a new one from Netgear, to take advantage of the new full HD abilities.
Sources :v3.co.uk,engadget.com
