The Sandy Bridge Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 27, 2010 2:38 PM ESTA New Socket and New Chipsets
There’s no nice way to put this: Sandy Bridge marks the third new socket Intel will have introduced since 2008. The first was LGA-1366 for the original Nehalem based Core i7. In 2009 we got LGA-1156 for Lynnfield, later updated with support for the dual-core Clarkdale CPUs launched in 2010. Next year, Sandy Bridge will launch with LGA-1155.
The CPU and socket are not compatible with existing motherboards or CPUs. That’s right, if you want to buy Sandy Bridge you’ll need a new motherboard.
As is the case today, there are two lines of chipsets for consumer desktops: H and P series. The H series supports Sandy Bridge’s on-die graphics, while the P series is strictly for discrete graphics.
At launch we’ll have P67 and H67 based motherboards, both of which are in testing right now. A quarter later we’ll see value H61 motherboards added to the mix.
Chipset Comparison | ||||||
P67 | H67 | H61 | P55 | H57 | H55 | |
CPU Support | Sandy Bridge LGA-1155 | Sandy Bridge LGA-1155 | Sandy Bridge LGA-1155 | Lynnfield / Clarkdale LGA-1156 | Lynnfield / Clarkdale LGA-1156 | Lynnfield / Clarkdale LGA-1156 |
CPU PCIe Config | 1 x 16 or 2 x 8 PCIe 2.0 | 1 x 16 PCIe 2.0 | 1 x 16 PCIe 2.0 | 1 x 16 or 2 x 8 PCIe 2.0 | 1 x 16 PCIe 2.0 | 1 x 16 PCIe 2.0 |
RAID Support | Yes | Yes | No | Yes | Yes | Mp |
USB 2.0 Ports | 14 | 14 | 10 | 14 | 14 | 12 |
SATA Total (Max Number of 6Gbps Ports) | 6 (2) | 6 (2) | 4 (0) | 6 (0) | 6 (0) | 6 (0) |
PCIe Lanes | 8 (5GT/s) | 8 (5GT/s) | 6 (5GT/s) | 8 (2.5GT/s) | 8 (2.5GT/s) | 6 (2.5GT/s) |
With P67 you lose integrated graphics but you gain the ability to run two PCIe x8 cards off of the CPU. You also get fully unlocked memory multipliers with P67, whereas H67 is locked to whatever official DDR3 speeds Intel supports with Sandy Bridge (currently DDR3-1333).
Both H67 and P67 support 6Gbps SATA, however only on two ports. The remaining 4 SATA ports are 3Gbps. Motherboard manufacturers will color the 6Gbps ports differently to differentiate.
There’s no native USB 3.0 support on these chipsets, but most motherboard makers are looking to third party solutions to enable USB 3 on Sandy Bridge boards.
The other major (and welcome) change is the move to PCIe 2.0 lanes running at 5GT/s. Currently, Intel chipsets support PCIe 2.0 but they only run at 2.5GT/s, which limits them to a maximum of 250MB/s per direction per lane. This is a problem with high bandwidth USB 3.0 and 6Gbps SATA interfaces connected over PCIe x1 slots. With the move to 5GT/s, Intel is at feature parity with AMD’s chipsets and more importantly the bandwidth limits are a lot higher. A single PCIe x1 slot on a P67 motherboard can support up to 500MB/s of bandwidth in each direction (1GB/s bidirectional bandwidth).
With native 6Gbps SATA support, the faster PCIe interface will be useful for any third party USB 3.0 controllers.
Original Nehalem and Gulftown owners have their own socket replacement to look forward to. In the second half of 2011 Intel will replace LGA-1366 with LGA-2011. LGA-2011 adds support for four DDR3 memory channels and the first 6+ core Sandy Bridge processors.
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tech6 - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
More speed with less power - it looks like a very competitive product. I really hope that AMD has something up their sleeve with Bulldozer and Bobcat to compete with Sandy Bridge.killless - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
17% higher performance is just not exciting.You need to give me 50% improvement at least to make me want to spend $1000 for new CPU/Motherboard/memory.
It really hasn't been all that exciting since Core 2 Quad...
tatertot - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
I take it turbo was also disabled on the rest of the parts used to compare, right?Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Turbo was enabled on everything else - SB performance should be higher for final parts.Take care,
Anand
tatertot - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Oh!Well that puts the IPC gains of Sandy over Westmere at something like 20% then, considering the 880 turbos up to 3.73GHz on single-threaded work.
That's pretty impressive.
Drag0nFire - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
I just want to say first of all, this totally made my Friday! I love previews of upcoming architectures!Any news on the roadmap for the mobile variant of Sandy Bridge? Or do I have to wait til IDF?
Jamahl - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
What system was this benchmarked on Anand?Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Clarkdale - those charts were actually pulled from here, just with the SB numbers added:http://www.anandtech.com/show/2952/2
We didn't have the system for long enough to rerun the tests with the 5450 on the H67 board. The 5450 is GPU bound at those resolutions/settings however:
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/5450_0203102236...
Those numbers were generated with a Core i7 920.
Take care,
Anand
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
I just ran a sanity check on the Core i7 880 with the 5450, the numbers don't move by more than the normal test margins - the 5450 is totally GPU bound here.Take care,
Anand
ESetter - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Do you know if any of the benchmarks make use of AVX instructions? Sandy Bridge effectively doubles the maximum throughput for compute-intensive operations like SGEMM and DGEMM. While it might not translate to a 2x speedup in real-world applications, I imagine it should give a significant gain, at least in the HPC field.