Oct 13, 2010 14:56 GMT  ·  By

While they won't actually become available in the market for some time yet, the Sandy Bridge series of central processing units from Intel has reportedly already entered mass production stage, with revenue units slated for Q4.

The Sandy Bridge series of CPUs will be superior to the current core series not just in terms of raw processing power, but also in terms of graphics.

The first such chips will have either two or four cores and will employ Turbo Boost and Hyper-threading, among other things.

There will be multiple models, such as 65W dual-core or quad-core chips or 95W quad-core units, the latter with, predictably, higher specifications.

The main highlight of all newcomers, however, will be the stronger graphics with Intel AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions), which boosts floating point, media and processor intensive software performance.

Now, according to a report made by X-bit Labs, the next-generation processors have entered mass production.

"[In the third quarter] we began volume production of Sandy Bridge and expect to ship revenue units in Q4 as we prepare for systems launch in the first quarter of 2011,” supposedly said Paul Otellini, chief executive officer of Intel, during the most recent conference call with financial analysts.

“Sandy Bridge represents the largest increase in computing performance in our history. This is a truly stunning product that we cannot wait to bring to market. Early demand from customers is much greater than we originally expected and we anticipate a very fast ramp," the CEO added.

"Our customers are very well aware of the quality of the integrated graphics and immediate performance of this product,” Otellini went on to saying.

“And that will help them make trade-offs in their bill of materials as they make SKU selections and configurations and so forth, which, I think, will benefit Intel," the CEO concluded.