Year of Intel
Chip behemoth Intel set the pace at the Consumer Electronics Show in the US last month, drawing first blood for the year against rival AMD with its “second gen” Core i5 and i7 chips, previously known as Sandy Bridge.
For the first time, integrated chipsets can achieve performance approaching and on occasion besting discrete systems. This is a big step forward for business systems builders who favour such chipsets because it means they can bring powerful desktops into customers’ fleets.
And at the end of the year or early next year comes Ivy Bridge, the 22nm die that will double the number of cores on the entry chips to four – eight and more for high- end uses. Perfect for virtualisation or compute-intensive tasks or just visualisation through DirectX 11.
But don’t expect AMD to stand still; its November preview revealed a slew of competitive chips for every segment and the impact of Intel Sandy Bridge motherboard chipset fault.
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