Intel Demos Upcoming 'Sandy Bridge' Tech, Investigates Expansion

At its investor meeting on Wednesday, Intel showed some new demonstrations of its upcoming Sandy Bridge microarchitecture and spoke about how the company is broadening its line. Dadi Perlmutter, executive vice president and general manager of the Intel Architecture Group, showed several demonstrations on machines based on the Sandy Bridge architecture: the next "tock" in the company's "tick/tock" plan for alternating between process changes and architecture changes [...] Another demo showed how much faster it was to convert a video clip on a Sandy Bridge–based laptop as compared with one using a Core i7 laptop. Another demo pushed the idea that discrete graphics alone weren't enough for gaming, showing that a Gulftown six-core chip and moving the display of rain from the GPU to the CPU allowed for more realism; and then also allowed for a multi-way video chat.