The Sandy Bridge Preview (Anand)

[saaya]

From Twitter:


EDIT: a larger preview is up: The Sandy Bridge Preview, enjoy!

thx for the headsup eric

but 1024x768? and only 40fps at that tiny res with MIN details?
and a 5450? 5400? i have no idea how fast a 5600 is, let alone a 5500 or 5400 series card... it doesnt exactly sound fast, especially if it cant get more than 30 odd fps at 1024x768
seriously... who actually runs 1024x768 these days?
edit:
http://store.steampowered.com/hwsurvey/
10%, lol...

with 2 igp cores itll be almost double that i suppose, but once you go to medium or even high settings, your back at 40fps at 1024x768...
thats good for laptops and ok for htpcs... depending on power consumption... but desktops?

The CPU will also have dedicated hardware video transcoding hardware

thats a lot of hardware

There’s no nice way to put this: Sandy Bridge marks the third new socket Intel will have introduced since 2008.

and there will be yet another socket within 6 months from that!

Original Nehalem and Gulftown owners have their own socket replacement to look forward to.

but thats not really the 5th socket within 3 years, that would be a bad thing... this is... the third socket of the highend segment... yeah, lets call it that, sounds a lot better doesnt it?

What I will say is this: Sandy Bridge is not a minor update. As you’ll soon see, the performance improvements the CPU will offer across the board will make most anyone want to upgrade.

video encoding: 11% average
16% photoshop
15% h.264
13% in wmp9
1% divx (lol?)

3d rendering: 13% average
10% in 3dsmax
11% cb 10 single
18% cb 10 multi
15% povray

compression/backup: 7% average
4% data recovery
10% winrar

games: 8% average
1% batman aa
1% dragon age
19% wow ( )
12% sc2

so a 10-15% perf boost (whenever the cpu is the limiting factor!) for a 15% lower power consumption? that sounds a lot better than i expected!

im still VERY sceptical about gaming performance though... 1680 and even 1024 benchmarks dont really mean much, if anything at all, in todays world... its at least partially a vga driver benchmark and not so much a cpu benchmark...

i disagree with anandtech, as i dont think a 10-15% performance boost will make a lot of people want to upgrade, especially since they will have to upgrade their mainboards as well... it will depend a LOT on how many multipliers intel unlocks and what the cpus will cost... if they keep prices high and hesitate to unlock multipliers, sb will end up a much WORSE buy than 1156 in several segments, at least for people that overclock their rigs...

i wonder how memory vendors view this... i dont think they are too happy that they will be limited to around 2133max, and that they wont be able to sell as much overclocking memory anymore... sure, you can still go from one memory multiplier to the next, but they are only even ones, which means 200mhz steps, and how do you want to differentiate your memory from your competitors? its very unlikely that your memory will be able to make an extra 200mhz over your competitors product using the same chips...
besides, did anybody else wonder how they want to reach 2133mhz mem clocks with a 100mhz ref signal?

im really glad anand used an 880 and threw in a 1090 as well, intels request of comparing the 2400 to a 760 is ridiculous imo...

and it seems nobody noticed that sandybridge will be hard locked to a max multiplier of 57?
57x100=5700mhz... lets say we can push bclock to 105mhz, or lets even say 110mhz...
57*105=6000mhz
57*110=6250mhz