Posted on Monday, December 21 2009 @ 19:31 CET by Thomas De Maesschalck
Bright Side of News
spotted Intel's desktop processor roadmap for 2010 only shows Westmere CPUs, which seems to imply that the Sandy Bridge architecture has been delayed to 2011.
As you could observe, after the i7 980X introduction in a month or two at the high end - which follows the entry level dual core Westmeres soon after you read this, there is NOTHING else in 2010. From a competitive point, still looks fine. At the top, the i7 980X will wipe the floor with anything AMD has right now, or any stepping they may come out with, in 2010. And at the low end, the dual core highly overclockable Westmeres can hold their own against entry level quad core AMDs.
But then, remember tick-tock? According to it, the Nehalem was planned and executed in 2008 [November 2008 launch], the Westmere die-shrik was scheduled for 2009 - OK, you get some dual core parts were shown off this month anyway, launching on January 7, 2010 with the first day of CES in Las Vegas. But the next major architecture, Sandy Bridge was planned for 2010. But now, 2010 roadmaps don't show Sandy Bridge at all! I'd really miss those Haifa-designed parts with all four CPU cores, plus a fast GPU, plus 8 MB cache and optimised DRAM controller - not to mention twice the per-core FP SSE throughput with AVX instructions.
