14 DAY TRIAL // Although there is still some time left until the very fist Sandy Bridge processors see the light of day, details about the upcoming 22nm die shrink of this architecture, code named Ivy Bridge, are starting to appear, the latest leaks giving us some details about the platform that will support the Ivy Bridge-EX processor.
According to the SemiAccurate website, this new platform will be called Brickland and it will come with support for the Ivy Bridge-EX processor, a chip designed to be used in "Data Demanding Enterprises".
As a result the Romley platform, that is comprised of a Sandy Bridge-EX processor and a Socket-R motherboard will be pushed towards the 4S Blade and HPC computing space.
Not many other details are known about Brickland at this time, but it is really likely that the Ivy Bridge-EX processor architecture will come with more than 10 cores while also featuring Hyper-Threading support.
This will replace the yet-unreleased Westmere-EX chip that Intel detailed a few months ago at Hot Chips.
When it becomes available, the Westmere-EX processor will come with either 12 or 10 cores, a bidirectional ring bus to address cache memory, four QPI system interconnects, a scalable memory interconnect with support for up to eight DDR channels, and two on-chip memory controllers.
It is not clear now many of these architectural changes will make their way into the Ivy Bridge-EX chip, although we will most certainly see a ring bus design since Sandy Bridge already employs this type of bus for sharing the cache memory between cores and the Intel HD on-die graphics.
Intel's roadmap for the Ivy Bridge-EX architecture is also an unknown, but we may have a long wait ahead of us considering that Westmere-EX will come to market sometime in Q2 2011.
Furthermore, the first Ivy Bridge processors should come in during the second half of 2011, so it's safe to assume that Brickland won't see the light of day until 2012.