14 DAY TRIAL // A series of details on Intel's upcoming 32nm Sandy Bridge architecture emerged into the wild today, showing that the A0 stepping reached the final stage of its design cycle in the 23rd week of the ongoing year. According to the news, the fresh CPU should become available on the market sometime in 2011, probably in the first quarter of the year, while sporting a quad-core design.
The quad-core Sandy Bridge chip is expected to come as a mainstream silicon, while also sporting 256KB L2 cache. The core clock of the processor is estimated to have been set at a frequency placed in the 2.8GHz to 3.4GHz range, though the Turbo mode will probably bring one of the cores up to values in the 3.8GHz to 4GHz range.
One more important detail about Intel's Sandy Bridge is that the CPU should come to the market packing a 32nm integrated graphics core running at 1.0GHz to 1.4GHz, which should be connected to the chip's L3 cache. Moreover, the silicon also sports integrated dual-channel DDR3-1600 memory controller, as well as the Sandy Bridge System Agent (Northbridge) that provides PCIe 2.0, DMI and PCU.
Other features of the quad-core Sandy Bridge chip include HyperTreading, AVX Ext instruction set, 256-bit vectors, 4 operands, AEX instructions, unrestricted VMX, and 8MB of shared L3 cache, not to mention the fact that its integrated graphics chip is reported to be able to rival low-end graphics cards from ATI or NVIDIA, though these might be only rumors in the end.
Intel's Sandy Bridge is reported to come with a TDP of 85W, while measuring 225mm², each core measuring around 20mm². Although no details are available at the moment, Guru3d also points towards upcoming dual-core and eight-core Sandy Bridge chips. At the same time, the news point towards the presence of the Socket 1156 of Clarkdale (Westmere generation), and shows that the IGP is based on GMA and not Larabee.