INTEL new architecture "Sandybridge"

[Superboo]

32 lanes of PCI-E 3 may be best for Quad cards... 8x 8x 8x 8x at PCI-e 3 is same as 16x 16x 16x 16x PCi-E 2

[Syphon]

You have to put into perspective; take the Steam hardware survery. Less than 1% of users on steam - tens of millions - have SLI/Crossfire. Intel has to be able to separate the various chipsets in one way or another e.g. Dual channel/Tri Channel, 32 vs 16 PCI-E Lanes and so on.

Put simply, not many people can afford to run 2 graphics cards on a P55 setup, because they might as well go for a single GPU X58 setup instead. It is always nice to have the option for full bandwidth multi-GPU scaling, but with <1% of people investing in it, which is the X58 crowd, Intel know that even if they did put it on the board, probably <0.5 or less would actually use it.

[Superboo]

Yea i suppose... But still they could add a few extra dozen in there for good mesure

[Death9000]

http://www.bit-tech.net/news/hardwar...overclocking/1

some of you may have already heard this

intel seem to be intentionally limiting overclocking on sandybridge most likely to seemingly sell on the higher priced 'K' series chips and or/ higher priced enthusiast and extreme parts.

Information provided by Intel in its own presentations about its upcoming mainstream LGA1155 Sandy Bridge CPUs appears to confirm the company has designed the CPUs to deliberately limit overclocking.

A video leaked to HKEPC and posted on YouTube (see from 2mins onwards) confirms the fact that only a 2-3 per cent OC via Base Clock adjustments will be possible. This is because Intel has tied the speed of every bus (USB, SATA, PCI, PCI-E, CPU cores, Uncore, memory etc) to a single internal clock generator issuing the basic 100MHz Base Clock.

This clock gen is integrated into the P67 motherboard chipset and transmits the clock signal to the CPU via the DMI bus. This means there's no need for an external clock generator that used to allow completely separate control of all the individual hardware.

When you're overclocking, you want to be able to push certain frequencies, such as the Base Clock and memory clock, but leave others, such as SATA, completely stable as they're very sensitive to adjustment. Current motherboards allow multiple bus speeds because external clock generators are programmable via the BIOS.

According to one Taiwanese motherboard company, on a Sandy Bridge system, the fact that all the busses are linked means that turning up the Base Clock by just 5MHz caused the USB to fail and SATA bus to corrupt.

[MoonPig]

This is the main reason i moved from Intel to AMD.

LGA775 lasted a fair while, but now they're releasing a new chipset every year. It just takes the mick.

AMD however, manage to use a platform for awhile. And even then make it backwards compatible.

[Syphon]

Intel are simply following Moore's Law as best they can. Seeing as Intel released Nehalem in September/October of 2008, it is been nearly 2 years, which is pretty consistent with their Tick-Tock model. Everyone knows to expect a new architecture/Product Line every 2 years; it is a way to let the customers know when the best time to upgrade is.

AMD have been behind Intel in nearly every way since Intel released the Core 2 Duo range. The fact that AMD is now a fabless CPU company confirms just how bad their situation is. Intel have Billions of Dollars in R&D and continue to strive ahead. I guess if you want cheap and cheeful, then AMD is the perfect solution, but performance numbers dont lie, Intel is litteraly years ahead on AMD in the performance game.

Personally, I dont mind upgrading every couple of years when i get a big boost - The clock-for-clock improvement for the C2Q Q9650 --> i7 965 was 30%.

[Superboo]

AMD have global