Intel quad-core Sandy Bridge taped out

The folks from Canard PC have published some new information about Intel's upcoming 32nm Sandy Bridge architecture. This new CPU is expected in Q1 2011 and according to the site the A0 stepping was taped out in the 23rd week of this year. The site reveals the mainstream quad-core Sandy Bridge chip will have four cores with 256KB L2 cache and initial estimates for clock speeds range from 2.8GHz to 3.4GHz, with a Turbo mode that should take one core to clock speeds of 3.8GHz to 4GHz. Sandy Bridge will have a 32nm integrated graphics core (1.0GHz to 1.4GHz) that is connected to the L3 cache, integrated dual-channel DDR3-1600 memory controller and the Sandy Bridge System Agent (Northbridge) that offers PCIe 2.0, DMI and PCU. It also features HyperTreading, AVX Ext instruction set, 256-bit vectors, 4 operands, AEX instructions, unrestricted VMX, shared 8MB L3 cache.

According to the site, the new integrated graphics core of Intel's Sandy Bridge should be able to compete with 2011 entry-level graphics cards from ATI and NVIDIA, although that seems quite optimistic. The quad-core Sandy Bridge has a 85W TDP and measures around 225mm