14 DAY TRIAL // As the official release date for Intel's Sandy Bridge CPUs draws ever near, more and more bits and pieces of information are starting to make their way online, the latest pertaining to the media acceleration features these latest-gen processors will be able to provide. So, as CNET informs us, it would seem that Stephen L. Smith, vice president and director of PC Client operations and enabling at Intel, confirmed at a Wells Fargo Technology, Media, and Telecom Conference held on November 9-10 that the company's future CPU will actually come equipped with dedicated media acceleration components, which are pretty much vital nowadays, given the huge amount of content currently available across the Internet. So, what this means is that we can expect the Sandy Bridge CPUs to provide the necessary support for DirectX 10.1 and OpenCL 1.1, both of which are frameworks that enable the acceleration of both games and other media applications. In this way, Intel makes sure that their CPUs will be able to deliver a very good media playback experience even for those systems relying solely on the built-in graphics, which should be a fairly interesting weapon for their Sandy Bridge marketing push. However, it would seem that Intel's official provided more information on some other interesting novelties we can expect from old “Chipzilla”, such as the fact that the company plans to move to the 22-nanometer Ivy Bridge silicon by the end of 2011, to this end, Intel investing some pretty serious amounts of money in adapting their factories to the new standards. Additionally, it would seem that Intel has set itself the pretty ambitious goal of reaching 8-nanometer processes by 2017, but that's still quite a long time away, and we're pretty sure that, until then, we'll see plenty of other surprises from the “sponsors of tomorrow”.
Sandy Bridge to provide built-in media accelerators
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