Sandy Bridge is a bridge to the future of processor technology. No wonder if we calledit. The reason, Sandy Bridge is the biggest change since the era of Intel’s Pentium 4.
In previous microarchitecture, Intel’s much more to optimize the performance of eachcomponent, without changing the way these components work. If the processor isanalogous to a home, Intel is just doing renovations to the house.
But in Sandy Bridge, Intel really building a new house. All the components are updated, ranging from branch predictors, out-of-order execution, until the work memorysubsystem.
But most important is Sandy Bridge is the actual manifestation of the fusion processor,aka the processor that brings together all components of the processor into a piece ofsilicon.
Actually, Intel has been doing this integration policy since 2 years ago. On thegeneration of Bloomfield processors, they include memory controller. At Lynnfield, PCI-E controller’s turn coming. The peak in the era of Clarkdale, when Intel onboard graphics chip.
There is one important note of the entire process: the actual components are stillseparate pieces of silicon in different. Well, that’s what Intel flatten in Sandy Bridge. All components in the Sandy Bridge processor is in a piece of silicon that is made with a32nm fabrication.
Components inside the processor itself is more or less the same as Nehalem. The firstcourse, the core processor. In this first generation of Sandy Bridge core number is still 2and 4, but will be followed by the next generation who have 6 and 8 core.
Each core has 256KB of L2 cache. Work aided aided L2 cache level 3 cache (L3cache) equal to the core with a size varying between 3-8MB, depending on thesegmentation. While PCI Express, DMI, and the memory controller and display interfaceto be assembled into one component called the System Agent
