Sandy Bridge (Patsburg) takes hold in 2011, farewell LGA 1366 and 1156

[Dwho]

Brace your selves in 2011 Intel will be bringing in the "Sandy Bridge" Micro-architecture that will replace Nehalem which is our Core i5-i7 series and Westmere which is our new 32nm Chips, Sandy Bridge has a set of new Sockets so any one with a current 1156 or 1366 mobo atm will have to get a new one to be able to upgrade. The new tech will include PCI Express 3.0 yes 3.0 and USB 3 and SATA 3 (6Gbps) natively. It will have no Northbridge chipset like now we have an X58 Northbridge which handles the PCIE lanes and the I/O controller (ICH) southbridge which takes in all the SATA and USB connections. You though Triple channel Memory was a lot a of memory bandwidth well Patsburg will have "Quad Channel" DDR3 Memory. The odd thing about this is that intel in November 2008 brought in Socket 1366 and they plan to kill it off after only 3 years, you would expect them to launch the new architecture in 2012 giving a 2 solid year gap for Westmere to grow and expand. Though if you are thinking about jumping to the X58 i7 Train make note that it will come to a grinding halt in Quarter 3 2011, though realistically speaking new PCIe 3 cards won’t be available until early to mid 2012 so if you've recently got a Core i7 or i5 build there is still plenty of time for you to get a somewhat decent amount of money out of this current platform. More on Patsburg and Sandy Bridge Below

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2010/04/21/intel-sandy-bridge-details-of-the-next-gen/1

[tennyson]

Thanx for the HU, mate.

That sort of info might just change my mind about sinking a sizeable amount of money into a technology that will be superceeded within a year. Ok for a 1000 dollar investment, but a bit embarrassing when you plan to lay out 4 or 5 grand.

Terrific stuff, mate.

Frank