Sandy Bridge Architecture to Include Special Accelerators

An Intel Vice-President has confirmed that processors using the upcoming Sandy Bridge architecture will include special media acceleration capabilities. At a Wells Fargo Securities conference, Stephen L. Smith, vice president and director of PC Client operations and enabling said “The other cool thing is dedicated circuitry for media acceleration, All of us in our daily use, whether it’s home videos or photos tend to pull things from the Internet, pull things from our own capture devices at home, bring them on to our PC, transform them into different formats… all of that will be dramatically faster if one utilizes this hardware acceleration, media acceleration that we have on Sandy Bridge."

_Improved media capabilities

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Sandy Bridge will support DirectX 10.1 and OpenCL 1.1 (for Mac operating systems). Stephen also pointed out that the new architecture should enable slimmer designs which provide performance similar to mainstream laptops.

He also reiterated that Intel is on track to deliver the 22-nanometer Ivy Bridge silicon, which is a shrink of Sandy Bridge with some enhancements. “We’re on track to develop our 22 nanometer with units in production by the end of 2011,” he said. He also repeated that Intel has invested “six to eight billion dollars to equip up to four factories for 22-nanometer production.”

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