What’s coming after the Core i7
@ 2009/07/08In line with Intel’s “tic-toc” the 32nm will be used first of all for a die-shrink of the current architecture, Westmere, before the arrival of the new Sandy Bridge architecture in the first quarter of 2011.
The first Sandy Bridge samples are reported to have been engraved already. On the 225mm² die there are 4 cores each with 256 KB of L2 and sharing an L3 cache of 8 MB, equivalent to those on the Core i7 but with improved latency. Each of these cores will support HyperThreading of new AVX (Advanced Vector Extension) instructions.
The first Sandy Bridge samples are reported to have been engraved already. On the 225mm² die there are 4 cores each with 256 KB of L2 and sharing an L3 cache of 8 MB, equivalent to those on the Core i7 but with improved latency. Each of these cores will support HyperThreading of new AVX (Advanced Vector Extension) instructions.
That specific Sandy Bridge information has been known for more than a year, and Westmere will be using P55 and P57 chipsets.