Thread: Anandtech News

Late last week we pulled back the covers on Intel's next-generation Core architecture update: Sandy Bridge. Due out in Q1 2011, we learned a lot about Sandy Bridge's performance in our preview. Sandy Bridge will be the first high performance monolithic CPU/GPU from Intel. Its performance was generally noticeable better than the present generation of processors, both on the CPU and GPU side. If you haven't read the preview by now, I'd encourage you to do so.

One of the questions we got in response to the article was: what about Sandy Bridge for notebooks?

While Sandy Bridge is pretty significant for mainstream quad-core desktops, it's even more tailored to the notebook space. I've put together some spec and roadmap information for those of you who might be looking for a new notebook early next year.



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Years ago I used to publish a series of articles called Behind AnandTech. We'd occasionally do a massive server upgrade and I'd publish detailed specs, shots and info about the upgrade as we went along the process. I believe the last one I published was our move to Athlon MP processors back in 2001. Since then we've had a number of upgrades, bringing our total server count up to 28. We run a mix of AMD and Intel hardware but it's all getting very old.

To make matters worse, as we've upgraded we have done so piecemeal. We have pockets of similar hardware, but there's very little consistency across the entire server farm.

For the past month, we've been working on changing that. And starting today, you're going to start seeing the fruits of our labor - part by part.



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Intel has launched their first dual-core Atom processor designed purely for netbooks, the N550. The new CPU has led to the netbook manufacturers scrambling to update their products to feature the latest silicon. Intel promises that there will be a significant boost in performance while maintaining the same battery life. Intel plans to make the most of the market dominance of their Atom CPUs before AMD launches their BobcatAPUs next year, which will look to provide some real competition in this space.



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We've looked at AMD's slightly older Tigris platform in the form of their M300 and M600 processors. While performance of those parts was better than previous AMD designs, Intel still maintained a healthy lead in performance and battery life. That wasn't too surprising, and the far more pertinent question is what the new Danube and Nile parts bring to the table. Having taken Nile for a spin and come away impressed, courtesy of the Toshiba T235D, we're now moving up to Danube. AMD again shipped us a recently launched Toshiba A660D notebook, which aims squarely at the midrange performance notebook market.

Sporting the first quad-core mobile AMD processor we've ever tested in the form of the Phenom II P920, the A660D should offer quite a bit more performance in heavily threaded workloads—though the low 1.6GHz base clock speed means dual-core parts should still be faster in lightly threaded tasks. Coupled with the P920 processor are AMD's HD 4250 IGP and HD 5650 discrete graphics, with switching technology providing the optimal choice of performance or battery life depending on if you have the AC adapter connected. Beyond the above, the A660D also provides an update to Toshiba's Satellite design, with a thinner chassis and less gloss. Does the A660D join the T235D as an AMD laptop we can recommend? That's what we're here to investigate.



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We kick off our long overdue focus on AMD with an in-depth review of ASRock's 890FX Deluxe 4. Landing with an MSRP of $180, the Deluxe 4 slots in between the very best 890GX motherboards and the enthusiast 890FX based offerings. Have ASRock done enough to draw our attention away from the cheaper 890GX based ASUS M4A89GTD Pro/USB3 (circa $150)? It's a close call; the M4A89GTD Pro is the better clocker, while the Deluxe 4 proves to be the more versatile workhorse...



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This summer has been a busy one for smartphone platforms. We started the summer with an Apple iOS update that remedied a number of the primary concerns with Apple’s iDevice platforms, followed by the launch of the iPhone 4. Meanwhile, the Android flagship crown was passed between no less than 4 devices (HTC Incredible, HTC EVO 4G, Droid X, and now arguably Droid 2 or Galaxy S phones), and Google’s OEM partners have slowly but surely rolled Froyo 2.2 out across their install base.

Now it’s Research In Motion’s turn to deliver a summer update. Their answer is two pronged - BlackBerry 6 (that’s not a typo, they’ve named the new OS after the platform itself - BlackBerry 6), and a new device for AT&T, the BlackBerry Torch.

Lately, the BlackBerry platform as a whole has been showing its age. Browsing the web and checking email on a mobile device are no longer novelties that wow on their own - they’re old hat. Further, smartphone browsers have established a pretty steady cadence toward parity with the desktop in both speed and rendering, something the BlackBerry’s previous web browser was frequently criticized for failing to deliver - at all.

On carriers like Verizon, where BlackBerry once reigned supreme at the top of the smartphone food chain, it now faces direct competition with Android. The first Storm was a commercial failure, and the Storm 2 - though better - was still not the proverbial home run RIM needed.

One year and one acquisition later, and RIM is ready to play ball with a modern, WebKit based browser, revamped hardware design, and true capacitive multitouch screen (sans SurePress). How does the BlackBerry Torch fare? Read on for the full review.



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Last week we published our preview of Intel's 2011 Core microarchitecture update, codenamed Sandy Bridge. In the preview we presented a conservative estimate of what shipping Sandy Bridge performance will look like in Q1 2011. I call it conservative because we were dealing with an early platform, with turbo disabled, compared to fairly well established competitors with their turbo modes enabled.

It shouldn't come as a surprise to you that this performance preview, ~5 months before launch, wasn't officially sanctioned or supported by Intel. All companies like to control the manner in which information about their products is released, regardless of whether the outcome is good or bad. We acquired the chip on our own, ran the benchmarks on our own and published the article, on our own.

As a result a number of questions remained unanswered. I measured significantly lower L3 cache latencies on SB vs. Westmere/Nehalem, I just have no idea why they were lower. I suspect many of these questions will be answered at IDF, but the point is that we were flying blind on this one.

A big unknown was the state of Sandy Bridge graphics. As I mentioned in the preview, there will be two types of integrated graphics enabled on Sandy Bridge parts: 1 core and 2 core parts. Intel refers to them as GT1 and GT2, respectively. The GT1 parts have 6 execution units (EUs), while the GT2 parts have 12.

While some desktop parts will feature GT2, all notebook parts (at launch) will feature GT2. Based on the information I had while running our tests, it looked like the Sandy Bridge sample was a GT1 part. With no official support from Intel and no way to tell how many EUs the sample had, I had no way to confirm. Since publication I've received more information that points to our sample being a GT2 part. It's not enough for me to 100% confirm that it's GT2, but that's what it looks to be at this point.

If it is indeed a GT2 part, the integrated graphics performance in our preview is indicative of the upper end of what you can expect for desktops and in the range of what we'd expect from SB notebooks (graphics turbo may move numbers up a bit but it's tough to tell at this point since our sample didn't have turbo enabled). As soon as I got this information I made updates to the articles indicating our uncertainty. I never like publishing something I'm not 100% sure of and for that, I owe you an apology. We trusted that our sources on the GT1/6EU information were accurate and in this case they may not have been. We all strive to be as accurate as possible on AnandTech and when any of us fail to live up to that standard, regardless of reasoning, it hurts. Thankfully the CPU and GPU performance data are both accurate, although we're simply unsure if the GPU performance will apply to the i5 2400 or not (it should be indicative of notebook SB GPU performance and some desktop SB GPU performance).

The desktop Sandy Bridge GPU rollout is less clear. I've heard that the enthusiast K-SKUs will have GT2 graphics while the more mainstream parts will have GT1. I'm not sure this makes sense, but we'll have to wait and see.

Many of you have been drawing the comparison to Llano and how it will do vs. Sandy Bridge. Llano is supposed to be based on a modified version of the current generation Phenom II architecture. Clock for clock, I'd expect that to be slower than Sandy Bridge. But clock for clock isn't what matters, it's performance per dollar and performance per watt that are most important. AMD has already made it clear that it can compete in the former and it's too early to tell what Llano perf per watt will be. On the CPU side I feel it's probably easy to say that Intel will have the higher absolute performance, but AMD may be competitive at certain price points (similar to how it is today). Intel likes to maintain certain profit margins and AMD doesn't mind dropping below them to maintain competitive, it's why competition is good.

Llano's GPU performance is arguably the more interesting comparison. While Intel had to do a lot of work to get Sandy Bridge to where it is today, AMD has an easier time on the graphics side (given ATI's experience). The assumption is that Llano's GPU will be more powerful than what Intel has in Sandy Bridge. If that's the case, then we're really going to have an awesome set of entry level desktops/notebooks next year.



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Our readership is composed largely of people who prefer to roll their own, but recently we've had the opportunity to take a look at some interesting desktop machines from big name manufacturers. Now we tread on much more challenging terrain: can a hardware boutique like iBUYPOWER make a convincing case for buying a custom built machine instead of learning to build one yourself? That's what we aim to find out in our review of iBUYPOWER's new flagship, the Paladin XLC.

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Our Ask the Experts series continues with another round of questions.

A couple of months ago we ran a webcast with Intel Fellow, Rich Uhlig, VMware Chief Platform Architect, Rich Brunner and myself. The goal was to talk about the past, present and future of virtualization. In preparation for the webcast we solicited questions from all of you, unfortunately we only had an hour during the webcast to address them. Rich Uhlig from Intel, Rich Brunner from VMware and our own Johan de Gelas all agreed to answer some of your questions in a 6 part series we're calling Ask the Experts. Each week we'll showcase three questions you guys asked about virtualization and provide answers from our panel of three experts. These responses haven't been edited and come straight from the experts.

If you'd like to see your question answered here leave it in the comments. While we can't guarantee we'll get to everything, we'll try to pick a few from the comments to answer as the weeks go on.



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When Fermi first launched on the desktop, we wondered how long it would take to trickle down to the lower end markets—and the mobile team also wondered if we'd ever see Fermi make it into notebooks. NVIDIA managed the latter with the GTX 480M, a lower clocked chip harvested from the full GF100. Now they're ready to launch the rest of their mobile lineup, with product schedule to start shipping later this month. Want to see what NVIDIA's brining to the table? We've got the official specs, though we do have to note that there are a few areas NVIDIA isn't discussing just yet. Regardless, we'll see plenty more Optimus Technology laptops and notebooks, and mobile GPUs may actually get the kick in the shorts we've been longing for!

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