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How Intel's New Sandy Bridge Technology gives you both speed and battery life
18 February, 2011 in General
For as long as there have been portable computers there has been a struggle to balance processing power and power consumption. This issue has never been more pressing than it is today, now that users look to laptops as mobile media centers and on the go gaming rigs, rather than the luggable text editors they were thirty years ago. As the demands for faster performance has increased, especially in graphics processing, prolonging battery life has been a challenge largely met by maintaining the status quo; slightly improving speeds, while keeping battery life the same. However, that's all going to change thanks to the recent release of Intel's Sandy Bridge processor, which promises blazing speeds and the best battery life ever achieved for a laptop this fast.
How long and how fast, you ask? Sandy Bridge processors have been benchmarked to last more than six hours on battery, while offering quad core processing speeds of up to 3.5Ghz. There are a few key reasons for this breakthrough. First and foremost is the all new chip design that does more than just patch on a few new enhancements to the same old technology. Intel is calling Sandy Bridge there 2nd Generation Core processor and with good reason. They have rebuilt the processor from the ground up, discarding the last vestiges of the Pentium Pro technology still buried inside the core and creating a design that's tailor made for a new generation of personal computers. The finer technical details are too immense to discuss, but in simplified terms the connections between the individual cores, the power management circuitry, and the memory controller have been redesigned for faster, cooler, less power consuming performance. Most of those changes were made to facilitate the best change of all; the integration of the HD G3000 graphics chipset directly into the CPU.
Making the GPU a part of the main CPU core translates into fantastic gains in graphics performance with a reduction in power consumption. Also, thanks to Intel's Quick Sync technology, the integrated GPU detects when a graphics task like converting or compressing a video is being executed and takes care of those tasks right on board in the GPU, getting such tasks done in a third to half the time it would take offloading them to a separate onboard chipset or discrete video card. Hands down, this redesign around the integrated GPU is the reason Sandy Bridge is the must have processor this year.
You might ask whether the improved battery life can only be attributed to the new GPU arrangement, and wonder if a discrete video card would bring the battery life plummeting back down with the improved performance. Not so, if the discrete card you choose has nVIDIA's Optimus technology, which, coupled with Sandy Bridge, can seamlessly, automatically, and instantaneously switch graphics tasks from the onboard GPU to the discrete GPU as conditions demand. This means a vast reduction in battery consumption as the nVIDIA GPU is completely turned off when unneeded, while being ready to boost performance in the latest 3D games and applications at a moment's notice.
If it's purely speed you're after, then Sandy Bridge will definitely deliver. In addition to the typical increase in clock speed, this processor also included Intel? Turbo Boost technology version 2.0, which automatically allows processor cores to run faster than their base operating frequency if the processor is operating below rated power, temperature, and current specification limits. In other words, it will intelligently overclock your processor for greater performance whenever conditions are safe to allow it. In internal tests, Intel was able to push the new chip to a stable 4.9GHz, outstanding for a commercial processor. Most benchmarks peg Sandy Bridge at 2-3 times faster than previous Core i processors, largely attributable to those redesigns mentioned earlier. Additionally, with the creation of the new processor architecture, came the need for new motherboards to support it. Intel's line of Sandy Bridge specific motherboards have doubled the size of the bus speed, meaning twice the lanes of traffic for data to move through, and all the boards include SATA III support, allowing your SATA III compatible drives to transfer data at a blistering 6 Gbp/s.
There is a lot of promise in this new processor. The boot-strap redesign of the core, the integration of the GPU, and the support for Optimus make this a battery saver's dream. While the intelligent overclocking and improved architecture of the motherboard and cores make it a powerhouse for the serious gamer. Both groups of features combine to make Sandy Bridge a force to be reckoned with. The bottom line is Intel is setting a new standard for processing power without robbing mobile computing of its mobility.
