Intel 'Ivy Bridge' desktop chip prices leak

We already have a pretty good idea of what the initial Ivy Bridge lineup is going to look like when Intel releases its next chip refresh in the first half of 2012. Now, the folks at CPU World are spilling the beans on yet another piece of the puzzle: pricing. For the most part it looks like Intel will maintain similar pricing to their current Sandy Bridge products. The Core i7-3770K, for example, will replace the Core i7-2700K at the same $332.

This will be the fastest and most expensive Ivy Bridge part at launch. Three remaining SKUs from the Core i7 family -- i7-3770, i7-3770S and i7-3770T -- will be priced at $294 in 1K quantities. Further down the ladder the unlocked-multiplier Core i5 3570K is priced at $225 while the i5-3500 and the energy-efficient i5-3570T and i5-3550S models are all priced at $205. Lastly, the Core i5-3450, i5-3450S, and i5-3470T are listed for $184.

Ivy Bridge i5 processors will continue on from Sandy Bridge offering four physical cores, 6MB of L3 cache and no hyper-threading, except for the i5 3470T which is a dual core unit with two hyper-threaded cores. Their Core i7 siblings are also running four physical cores, but can handle eight simultaneous threads and have 2MB more cache available. The table below contains a summary of the upcoming chips' specs and prices:

Model	Cores	Threads	Frequency	Turbo Frequency	L3 cache	TDP	Price	Sandy Bridge CPU / price
Core i5-3450	4	4	3.1 GHz	3.5 GHz	6 MB	77 Watt	$184	i5-2400 / $184
Core i5-3450S	4	4	2.8 GHz	3.5 GHz	6 MB	65 Watt	$184	i5-2400S / $184
Core i5-3470T	2	4	2.9 GHz	3.6 GHz	3 MB	35 Watt	$184	i5-2390T / $184
Core i5-3550	4	4	3.3 GHz	3.7 GHz	6 MB	77 Watt	$205	i5-2500 / $205
Core i5-3550S	4	4	3 GHz	3.7 GHz	6 MB	65 Watt	$205	i5-2500S / $205
Core i5-3570K	4	4	3.4 GHz	3.8 GHz	6 MB	77 Watt	$225	i5-2500K / $216
Core i5-3570T	4	4	2.3 GHz	3.3 GHz	6 MB	45 Watt	$205	i5-2500T / $205
Core i7-3770	4	8	3.4 GHz	3.9 GHz	8 MB	77 Watt	$294	i7-2600 / $294
Core i7-3770K	4	8	3.5 GHz	3.9 GHz	8 MB	77 Watt	$332	i7-2700K / $332
Core i7-3770S	4	8	3.1 GHz	3.9 GHz	8 MB	65 Watt	$294	i7-2600S / $294
Core i7-3770T	4	8	2.5 GHz	3.7 GHz	8 MB	45 Watt	$294	N/A

Intel set to release Core i5-2550K quad-core unlocked CPU

Intel is planning to release another Sandy Bridge CPU before Ivy Bridge is launched next year. The Core i5-2550K will feature an unlocked clock multiplier and four CPU cores, according to an investigative report from CPU World.

A new entry in the Material Declaration Data Sheets database revealed the BX80623I52550K box part number, CM8062301213000 OEM part number and SR0QH S-spec code. Because the part was just recently added to the database and the i5-2550K isn’t on Intel’s roadmap, it is believed that the decision to launch this processor was only recently made.

Aside from a slightly higher default clock speed, likely 3.4GHz, the chip will be functionally identical to a Core i5-2500K with the aforementioned unlocked multiplier, HD 3000 graphics, 6MB of L3 cache, Turbo Boost support and a 95 watt TDP. One could speculate that the 2550K will be priced slightly higher than existing 2500K models and perhaps overclock higher based on better binning.

No launch date or price has been issued yet but the CPU will likely drop around the same time as the next round of AMD FX-Series CPUs are released. Perhaps Intel didn’t get the recent memo from AMD spokesperson Mike Silverman when he went on record with the San Jose Mercury News proclaiming that AMD is no longer trying to compete with Intel. Either way, more products on the market at different price points means more options for the end user.

Gigabyte releases Sandy Bridge SATA checker utility

The past few days have seen some of the world's biggest companies in the computer industry announce replacement and repair programs to deal with Intel's 6-Series chipset flaw. PC makers including Hewlett-Packard, Dell, and Toshiba have pulled systems from their online and retail stores, while motherboard makers Asus, Gigabyte and MSI have pledged to offer customers hassle-free solutions in what is expected to be a costly recall for the chip giant.

For now a simple workaround is to plug any hard drives or optical drives into the unaffected SATA III 6Gbps ports on your motherboard. But Gigabyte is aware not everyone knows how to do that and has come up with a simple utility to guide less tech-savvy users. Interestingly, it seems the utility isn't tied solely to Gigabyte motherboards either.

Essentially the Gigabyte 6 Series SATA Check tool will detect any devices hooked up to the SATA II 3Gbps ports and provide guidance as to which ports to use instead. Needless to say the utility does not fix the problem with the chipset, but merely makes it super-easy to identify whether you're using the affected ports or not. In case you are using three or more SATA devices the company reasonably advises users to prioritize important devices on the SATA III ports (e.g. the hard drive with your operating system on it), and the less important devices on the SATA II ports (e.g. a DVD ROM).

Revised P67 and H67 boards are expected to begin appearing in April and manufacturers should start offering replacements accordingly. In the meantime, if you are already stuck with one of the faulty ones and need some help with your SATA ports -- or know someone who does -- you can get Gigabyte's 6 Series SATA Check tool here.

Efficiency Comparison: Sandy Bridge Vs. Intel And AMD CPUs

The second-generation Core processors arrived with a bang, but what sort of progress can you expect in the performance per watt department? We compare Core i5/i7-2x00 to AMD's Phenom with four and six cores, as well as previous-gen parts from Intel.

Intel’s next-generation desktop platform, code-named Sandy Bridge, has finally arrived. Our article, Intel’s Second-Gen Core CPUs: The Sandy Bridge Review, digs into the architecture and performance benchmarks of the new processors and chipsets, while the article you’re reading today focuses on power consumption and power efficiency.

Lower power consumption levels are no longer just nice to have, but in fact we’re observing that power consumption and power management are turning into features that ultimately also help maximizing performance in many popular load scenarios. This is even more important, as Intel designed Sandy Bridge to be modular, so that it can scale from entry-level Core i3 to the high-end Xeons later this year. Effectively, the majority of Intel’s mainstream processor portfolio will be based on Sandy bridge by the end of 2011, which makes an additional efficiency analysis worthwhile.

Sandy Bridge will be deployed all the way down to the entry level later this year.

It was largely anticipated that Sandy Bridge would be capable of delivering more performance than Nehalem, and that it might use less power while delivering it. Our launch coverage already confirmed that Sandy Bridge (manifest in the Core i3-, i5-, and i7-2000-series), delivers substantially more performance than its predecessor. Architectural improvements are at the heart of this speed-up. An efficient ring bus, a decoded µop cache, improved branch prediction, larger buffers, widened floating point throughput, and improved memory availability all add up to notable clock-for-clock gains; we saw those all surface in the launch coverage, comparing Nehalem and Sandy Bridge in the single-threaded iTunes and Lame benchmarks.

In the end, Intel is moving more firepower and more features into existing segments. Although the LGA 1155 platform maintains the 95 W power envelope common in the company's mid-range portfolio today, Sandy Bridge processors are designed to radically shut off functional units when they aren’t needed. If you read our Sandy bridge launch article, you will probably remember that the processors feature a power control unit and three separate voltage and frequency domains. These facts are the main reason why LGA 1155 had to lose one pin (and backwards compatibility). The voltage regulators have to be capable of switching high currents much more responsively than before in order to properly support Sandy Bridge.

The S and T series bring thermal design power down to 65, 45, or even 35 W for low-power desktop applications by restricting clock speeds here and there. We will spend some time testing these offerings soon, but focus on the mainstream Core i5- and i7-2x00 series in this article.

Our efficiency testing is split into two parts. First, we look at systems with integrated graphics. Then, we compare machines with a discrete graphics card. The test systems with integrated graphics include an 890GX-based motherboard hosting AMD’s Phenom II X4 965 and X6 1100T. Picking slower AMD offerings would have moved the comparison price point too far down. We also added Intel’s H55 platform with the Core i5-661 and i3-530 dual-core CPUs, and H67 with Core i5-2500K and i7-2600K.

On the discrete graphics side, we grabbed the same AMD solutions, Intel’s Core i5-750 and Core i7-875K, and again the new Core i5-2500K and Core i7-2600K.

The Sandy Bridge Review: Intel Core i7-2600K, i5-2500K and Core i3-2100 Tested

Intel never quite reached 4GHz with the Pentium 4. Despite being on a dedicated quest for gigahertz the company stopped short and the best we ever got was 3.8GHz. Within a year the clock (no pun intended) was reset and we were all running Core 2 Duos at under 3GHz. With each subsequent generation Intel inched those clock speeds higher, but preferred to gain performance through efficiency rather than frequency.

Today, Intel quietly finishes what it started nearly a decade ago. When running a single threaded application, the Core i7-2600K will power gate three of its four cores and turbo the fourth core as high as 3.8GHz. Even with two cores active, the 32nm chip can run them both up to 3.7GHz. The only thing keeping us from 4GHz is a lack of competition to be honest. Relying on single-click motherboard auto-overclocking alone, the 2600K is easily at 4.4GHz. For those of you who want more, 4.6-4.8GHz is within reason. All on air, without any exotic cooling.

Unlike Lynnfield, Sandy Bridge isn’t just about turbo (although Sandy Bridge’s turbo modes are quite awesome). Architecturally it’s the biggest change we’ve seen since Conroe, although looking at a high level block diagram you wouldn’t be able to tell. Architecture width hasn’t changed, but internally SNB features a complete redesign of the Out of Order execution engine, a more efficient front end (courtesy of the decoded µop cache) and a very high bandwidth ring bus. The L3 cache is also lower and the memory controller is much faster. I’ve gone through the architectural improvements in detail here. The end result is better performance all around. For the same money as you would’ve spent last year, you can expect anywhere from 10-50% more performance in existing applications and games from Sandy Bridge.

I mentioned Lynnfield because the performance mainstream quad-core segment hasn’t seen an update from Intel since its introduction in 2009. Sandy Bridge is here to fix that. The architecture will be available, at least initially, in both dual and quad-core flavors for mobile and desktop (our full look at mobile Sandy Bridge is here. By the end of the year we’ll have a six core version as well for the high-end desktop market, not to mention countless Xeon branded SKUs for servers.

The quad-core desktop Sandy Bridge die clocks in at 995 million transistors. We’ll have to wait for Ivy Bridge to break a billion in the mainstream. Encompassed within that transistor count are 114 million transistors dedicated to what Intel now calls Processor Graphics. Internally it’s referred to as the Gen 6.0 Processor Graphics Controller or GT for short. This is a DX10 graphics core that shares little in common with its predecessor. Like the SNB CPU architecture, the GT core architecture has been revamped and optimized to increase IPC. As we mentioned in our Sandy Bridge Preview article, Intel’s new integrated graphics is enough to make $40-$50 discrete GPUs redundant. For the first time since the i740, Intel is taking 3D graphics performance seriously.

CPU Specification Comparison
CPU	Manufacturing Process	Cores	Transistor Count	Die Size
AMD Thuban 6C	45nm	6	904M	346mm2
AMD Deneb 4C	45nm	4	758M	258mm2
Intel Gulftown 6C	32nm	6	1.17B	240mm2
Intel Nehalem/Bloomfield 4C	45nm	4	731M	263mm2
Intel Sandy Bridge 4C	32nm	4	995M	216mm2
Intel Lynnfield 4C	45nm	4	774M	296mm2
Intel Clarkdale 2C	32nm	2	384M	81mm2
Intel Sandy Bridge 2C (GT1)	32nm	2	504M	131mm2
Intel Sandy Bridge 2C (GT2)	32nm	2	624M	149mm2

It’s not all about hardware either. Game testing and driver validation actually has real money behind it at Intel. We’ll see how this progresses over time, but graphics at Intel today very different than it has ever been.

Despite the heavy spending on an on-die GPU, the focus of Sandy Bridge is still improving CPU performance: each core requires 55 million transistors. A complete quad-core Sandy Bridge die measures 216mm², only 2mm² larger than the old Core 2 Quad 9000 series (but much, much faster).

As a concession to advancements in GPU computing rather than build SNB’s GPU into a general purpose compute monster Intel outfitted the chip with a small amount of fixed function hardware to enable hardware video transcoding. The marketing folks at Intel call this Quick Sync technology. And for the first time I’ll say that the marketing name doesn’t do the technology justice: Quick Sync puts all previous attempts at GPU accelerated video transcoding to shame. It’s that fast.

There’s also the overclocking controversy. Sandy Bridge is all about integration and thus the clock generator has been moved off of the motherboard and on to the chipset, where its frequency is almost completely locked. BCLK overclocking is dead. Thankfully for some of the chips we care about, Intel will offer fully unlocked versions for the enthusiast community. And these are likely the ones you’ll want to buy. Here’s a preview of what’s to come:

The lower end chips are fully locked. We had difficulty recommending most of the Clarkdale lineup and I wouldn’t be surprised if we have that same problem going forward at the very low-end of the SNB family. AMD will be free to compete for marketshare down there just as it is today.

With the CPU comes a new platform as well. In order to maintain its healthy profit margins Intel breaks backwards compatibility (and thus avoids validation) with existing LGA-1156 motherboards, Sandy Bridge requires a new LGA-1155 motherboard equipped with a 6-series chipset. You can re-use your old heatsinks however.

Clarkdale (left) vs. Sandy Bridge (right)

The new chipset brings 6Gbps SATA support (2 ports) but still no native USB 3.0. That’ll be a 2012 thing it seems.

Refer To : http://www.anandtech.com