Well, I’ve not followed much about the tech apart from people saying on Aria forums it’ll be amazing.
It seems it has created one heck of a stink within the UK retailers though, suppliers and retailers being bad mouthed and quoted all over the place.
General 10,000foot overview. Product NDA lifts on the 9th, the review NDA lifted yesterday and to compound it an error by a distributor meant a lot of retailers mistakenly lifted the product NDA. Now even those who did that are being blocked supply by some with a load of back handedness from what I understand.
The tech is boring, tbh, I’m never interested in getting the latest, wait until the bugs and issues are ironed out and go second generation. What is interesting is companies showing true colours again, some very aggressive activities going on
Yet another socket configuration from Intel… Why the hell can’t they keep developing existing sockets rather than bring out new with each generation???
This is one of the reasons I have stuck with AMD products… Compatibility and upgrade-ability…
AMD have a spree of new cores coming out this year too. Still waiting specific tech reviews on the various products, but the views I’ve seen in various PC mags, say that they have a great line-up, especially with the new Bulldozer core and low power products, for thin clients and notebooks too.
I have to say, having gone to the AM3 Phenom, I’d agree - price against the performance is just a no contest. Even the stress I put a machine under with Visual Studio instance, Adobe stuff, browsers etc the AMD just rocks
Tech wise, performance sounds promising. Reports of easy air overclocks to 4 GHz+. Various benchmarks shows improvement from current Core i5/7 processors, although I’ve not been able to determine IPC style improvement level due to the old questions of threading and turbo clocks for good measure. I don’t care if it doesn’t fit in existing sockets since I tend to build new each time as mobos move on too. Since Sandy Bridge now incorporates gfx in CPU that in itself would suggest a more radical change in itself. Also the performance of the built in gfx doesn’t totally stink any more!
AMD to me are still only interesting if you care about nothing else other than pure price/performance ratio, which is another way of saying cruncher builds
That depends on what you need graphics for. Gaming, no way. CAD design, maybe (okay, probably). Everything else, good to go.
I actually read an article on this the day before this thread was posted. The author asked a good question, which is why Intel didn’t elect to support video switching between the on board and a dedicated GPU. This is done on laptops, so why not here? The technology has already been developed.
On the gfx front, while I can’t remember the exact chipset comparisons, at least it looks competitive against the similar integrated solutions from ATI/Nvidia. Before that of course, it was absolutely no chance of running anything. Now it may be adequate for lower detail or older less demanding games for a casual player. That in itself might be enough to bring the PC back in as a budget 3D gaming platform. Of course it in no way replaces add in gfx for more hard core gamers.
For perspective, my current laptop is over 6 years old now. It has Radeon Mobility 9700 gfx, and runs TF2 “ok”. Take the ATI integrated on my X6 system (forgot exact chipset) but it isn’t anything spectacular. It surprised me when I ran assorted more recent 3DMarks on it, it was actually scoring higher! I haven’t run TF2 on it though, but integrated certainly has come a long way, and this is Intel finally playing catchup in that department.
Question is, do you want to use the Integrated Graphics, or have the ability to Overclock? Only P67 allows for overclocking but doesn’t use the integrated graphics, where as H67 is vice versa.
Ooh, I missed that detail on the earlier read through of reviews. That’s slightly annoying especially as they put even faster integrated gfx into the multiplier unlocked K suffixed processors. Still, for the vast majority of people who don’t go anywhere near overclocking, I’m sure the integrated gfx improvement will be welcome.
so you get a locked chip with graphics, or an unlocked chip without graphics. Makes sense I suppose, I’m still waiting for the new AMD before deciding though.
This is a chipset limitation. All Sandy Bridge processors have built in gfx. The K suffix models with unlocked multiplier have even faster gfx than the standard models. A possible problem is if you want to overclock you need to use the P67 chipset, which doesn’t use the built in gfx. Not a limitation for performance box builders who would add external gfx anyway, but that will increase cost for CPU crunchers. The H67 chipset doesn’t allow access to the unlocked multipliers it seems so would be of no value to overclockers.
Rumour is there may be a future chipset to allow both onboard gfx and overclocking.
Edit: thinking about it, with ever more GPU crunching popping up now is there still much of a scenario for CPU only crunching boxes? Not saying GPU renders CPU obsolete, but if you’re going to crunch, you might as well maximise output.
