Inside Intel's Sandy Bridge architecture

Rick Merritt, EETimes
9/13/2010 9:17 PM EDT

SAN JOSE, Calif. – Intel has officially entered the race to heterogeneous computer processors, sketching out the first members of its Sandy Bridge family that will ship before April. The 32nm chips will come in versions with two or four dual-threaded x86 cores and one graphics core on a shared ring interconnect.

The first Sandy Bridge parts are aimed at notebooks, desktops and single-socket servers. Versions with more cores aimed at multi-socket servers will follow later in the year or early in 2012.

The Intel CPUs will compete head on with parts from archrival Advanced Micro Devices such as Ontario, a 40nm CPU using two of AMD's new Bobcat cores and a Microsoft DirectX11-class graphics core. Ontario is sampling now, and AMD has similar desktop and server chips in the works for the second half of 2011.

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