Sandy BridgeInside Intel’s Latest Innovation

Verizon iPhoneA First Look

Google’s Android 3.0 HoneycombReviewed

iSSue 1 | Jan. 2011

At its most basic, Sandy Bridge is the latest “tock” in Intel’s tick-tock development strategy: the latest iteration of the Westmere-based, 32nm die-shrink of the Nehalem microarchitecture that Intel released at the beginning of the year. They won’t fit the LGA1156 socket those chips use, however—they’ll need a new one, LGA1155, which will be released on motherboards using the new Series 6 chipset at the same time Sandy Bridge CPUs are released.

But beyond all that, Sandy Bridge is really about unity. Yes, it finally brings the memory controller, PCI Express (PCIe) controller, and video functions within the processor die, which by

itself is an enormous change that has major performance repercussions. But it also strikes up a much clearer parity with the modern computing world: finding new ways, for example, to take advantage of large numbers of processing cores (necessary, as Intel released the first consumer-oriented six-core processor earlier this year), and use less power to do everything.

Most users won’t notice these changes, but many of them are substantial ones that could be setting the ground for even more exciting developments to come. Read on for our look at what’s going on in Sandy Bridge, and what benefits it may hold for computer users and builders starting in 2011.

code-namedSandy Bridge The Latest Innovation From Intel

At this week’s Intel Developer Forum in San Francisco, Intel wasted no time revealing the most anticipated technology of the three-day conference: its second-generation Core microarchitecture, code-named Sandy Bridge. It’s due for both desktop and laptop release at the first part of next year, but has been generating buzz for months as tantalizing little details have slowly leaked out. When it came to Sandy Bridge, we wanted to know two things: What exactly was it, and was it worth all the hype? The first question has been definitively answered—and we think we’ve got a good start on the second.

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By: Matthew Murray

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“But beyond all that, Sandy Bridge is really about unity.”

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Sandy Bridge now treats where you want to store data and what data you want to store as separate functions. (Intel began implementing this idea in Nehalem.) When an instruction is decoded, the uop cache checks to see whether it’s already cached. If the instruction is, the cache shuts down the rest of the pipeline and the front end. If it’s not, the instruction is cached; the cache can store up to 1,500 instructions, and is direct-mapped for easier access. If an instruction hasn’t been used in a while, it’s discarded once additional space is needed. Because the uop cache has marginally higher and more consistent bandwidth than the instruction cache, this one-two punch has a significant impact on both power and performance.

In addition, the use of a new physical register file instead of a centralized retirement register file reduces the need for large, complex out-of-order execution

Two of the major changes that Sandy Bridge introduces come right at the front end: a new decoded micro-operation cache and revamped branch prediction.

“it results in a total of 48 bytes per cycle internal memory bandwidth.”

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hardware. The physical register stores operands, so that uops only carry the pointers to the operands they need a much lighter load. The savings here enable the use of Advanced Vector Extensions (AVX) instructions, which can use operands up to 256 bits in size and borrow 128 bits of the now–256-bit integer SIMD path, enabling twice the floating point throughput. Because this increase in floating point performance introduces new demands, the memory cluster has been changed as well. There are now two load/store ports, and Sandy Bridge uses symmetric address ports so that each port can service a load or store address, resulting in double the load bandwidth. According to a presentation held Monday at IDF, this is the Sandy Bridge change that most increased performance: It results in a total of 48 bytes per cycle internal memory.

It’s impossible to say right now whether Sandy Bridge will live up to Intel’s extravagant claims for it—we still have a few months left until it’s released, and a lot can happen in that time.

But based on what we’ve seen and heard so far, we’re intrigued. It looks like Sandy Bridge doesn’t just build on Nehalem’s innovations, but it also expands into directions we hadn’t previously considered. Intel’s techniques for dealing with the on-board graphics (particularly media processing) and the revamped Turbo Boost strike us as particularly exciting changes, and we can’t wait to see how—if—they pan out in the real world.

And for that, again, we have to wait—as do enthusiasts, who won’t be reaping the benefits of early adoption this time around. Intel is taking a lot of surprising chances, and making a lot of daring choices, with Sandy Bridge, and seeing whether they pay off—and how they compare to AMD’s own ideas about uniting formerly disparate technologies on the same processor die—is already poised to be one of the most exciting tech events of early 2011

“We can’t wait to see how — if? — they pan out in the real world.”

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Google’s android 3.0Honeycomb

Google took the wraps off Android Honeycomb, the latest edition of its mobile OS, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Vegas this week. So why serve up another new version when the last one, Android Gingerbread, is barely out of the oven? It’s simple: Unlike Gingerbread, Honeycomb isn’t made for your phone.

Honeycomb, as Google explains it, is “built entirely for tablet.” It’ll appear on devices like Motorola’s Xoom Android tablet and a slew of other products set to launch soon. Make no mistake about it: The Android tablet army is here, and it’s ready to do battle.

By: JR Raphael & Jason Chen

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“Think of Honeycomb as the tablets’ secret weapon.”

Here’s the Android 3.0 Honeycomb homescreen for tablets. It’s slightly different from Android’s phone-interface to take advantage of the larger tablet-sized screen, which means there’s even better multitasking and widgets.

Besides this multitasking improvements, you also have improved notifications (popups in the bottom right corner). Developers can use these more advanced notifications using their API, which can include stuff like sounds, icons, music controls, and anything else that talks to applications.

The application bar on the top is something that changes when you interact with different objects and apps. For example, when you’re in Gmail, it’ll change to Archiving, Deleting and so forth—email actions.

Here’s how you customize the homescreen. They showed this to show off the new 2D/3D frameworks, such as the YouTube browser below, or the books app. The 3D page turning animations and scrolling are very smooth, but they’re more eye candy. It’s also good that the eye candy doesn’t get in the way of performance though.

Next up is media capabilities. First is the new camera app. It’s more advanced, functionality-wise, than the current Android camera, and works on both phones and tablets.

Then, video chat. It’s included in Android 3.0 Honeycomb by default. There’s a contact shortcut widget on the homescreen, which you can use to email or video chat with someone.