LGA 1156 Core i5

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Hmm, I thought NB and the IGP was still 130nm or maybe 90nm, but not 65nm..

Anyway, I'm sure benchies will be forthcoming soon. I see the Enquirer already has a story on the XS post and comparing Superpi numbers :)
 
Well ,at least itll be better, and doing twice as much will almost catch them up in performance to the others. If the drivers are good, and the vid playback is better, allowing for lower stress on the cpu, it may be a decent solution.
Id like to see power numbers tho, especially vid playback
 


seems to me like that will just make things like voltage regulation etc a more complex process :S
 
It should be seperately pinned, so power may not be a problem, more the syncing for ocing. Im pretty sure theyve somehow seperated it all out. One thing tho, having higher clocks might be tough for the igp, at least early on. The 45nm isnt HKMG is it? for the igp?
 
thats what gets me tho - the socket has a 1 pin difference between igp and no igp, but then again we dont know about the connectivity - the cpu has a PCIe controller that may just feed it PCIe power from that plane or something?

I hear for chipsets Intel uses old outdated plants (still using old manafacturing processes eg current is 45nm they may still be doing 65/90nm etc) to make chipsets (and save production costs etc) - if its 45nm then id say it would be (same as 45nm cpus)? and they have the chance to make it a bit more aggressive (clock speed, tdp) etc so
 


That's exactly what I heard as well - Intel doesn't just chuck out or sell their outdated fab equipment - they migrate the chipsets, IGP and whatnot to it, so it's generally 2-3 fab generations behind.

Of course I read that over a year ago, so things may have changed in the rotten economy. Intel did shut down a bunch of older fabs in various places like the Phillipines IIRC.
 
Ok, how is producing at 90nm cheaper than at 45nm? I thought 45nm was cheaper. Also, overclocking should take a serious hit. You'll have much more heat than normal CPUs and this demands for a better stock cooler.

Didn't I hear that GPUs switching from 55nm to 40nm would reduce their costs?
 


I don't think anybody is claiming 90nm is cheaper than 45nm. Clarksdale has a 32nm CPU and 45nm IGP, and the discussion was how many transistors Intel would gain going from the previous node that IGP was fabricated on, to the 45nm node. If the previous node was 90nm, as I had heard, then the 45nm node would be around 4X more transistors at the same die size. If, as JDJ says, it was 65nm, then the gain would be 2X.

My info is over a year old so maybe JDJ's view is more current :)

Anyway, you can always disable the IGP and use a discrete GPU. What would be interesting is if you could do that without rebooting..
 
^Why would someone want to do that? What I want to know is, if you use a discrete GPU, will your IGP still produce heat? Heat is one thing I don't know how Intel's going to manage. They have both the CPU and the GPU to cool with one cooler.
 


Since they're on separate power pins, I'd imagine the IGP could be powered down to a sleep state when not needed. Anyway, I doubt the IGP would use as much juice as the CPU, until Intel starts using Larrabee as the 'IGP' :)
 
^ Oh, yeah, right. We (the users) never asked Intel for a GPU in the CPU. Face it. 99% of users are not going to use it. They're just wasting their money - Intel. And I suppose the IGP will increase the overall size of the CPU despite the CPU going to 32nm? One more thing. Intel went from 478 contacts to 775 to 1366. Why come down to 1156 now?
 


LGA775 is dead. There will be no more LGA775 CPUs made. Just the ones that are being made now and those will stop being made by next year.

Intels 32nm Westmere is also going to be a 6 core.

In the end we will only have LGA1156 and 1366 but I haven't heard any news of dropping it yet. Might have to read up.
 


You're looking at it from the enthusiast's POV, which is a pretty small segment of the overall market. For casual and for business use, IGP's are just fine. And gamers can disable the IGP in favor of a discrete GPU.

The reduced pin count is due to eliminating the 3rd memory channel - i5 uses 2-channel DDR3, not tri-channel like i7.
 
But how does it benefit graphics if the GPU is transferred from the mobo to the CPU? Does it make things faster since the memory transfer will be faster?