Discoveries today have uncovered one of the first processors using Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture in a handful of notebooks along with as yet unannounced AMD mobile graphics. The
Acer Aspire 5750, an unknown
Gateway model and a
Lenovo IdeaPad Y560P all show the Core i7-2630QM, a quad-core 2GHz processor. Most details aren't known of the chips themselves, but most should be accompanied by the HM65 chipset part of Intel's future Huron River platform.
Sandy Bridge will still be based on the existing 32 nanometer manufacturing process, but the new architecture will include Advanced Vector Extensions to improve performance in certain media and math tasks and better handling of out-of-order execution. The integrated graphics may be the biggest leap as a brand new core will exist directly on the processor and give dedicated-level video performance that may include OpenCL general-purpose computing acceleration.
Some of the notebooks also have the Mobility Radeon HD 6550 or 6570. Their details remain a mystery but are likely to see them as direct replacements for the 5500 series. The desktop Radeon HD 6000 series primarily improves the performance per watt as well as adding antialiasing and hardware tessellation.
Intel has already confirmed that Sandy Bridge will get its debut at a CES keynote, making it very likely that all of the notebooks and AMD's graphics will launch at the same time.
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