If an insider reporting to CNET is to be believed, it looks like the initial notebook offerings to employ Intel’s Sandy Bridge processor architecture will be of the quad-core variety. That’s right… no dual-cores at launch. This is quite the shift from previous launches, where dual-cores have come first and then quad-cores. Does this tell us about the state of computing, or could there be other reasons behind this decision?
It could be speculated that Intel had plans to launch its dual-core Sandy Bridge models at CES as well, but as the silicon has been in working order for some time, that seems unlikely. Also, Intel doesn’t have a huge record of late launches, so overall, this looks to be intentional. That being the case, things are made all the more interesting.
The most interesting thing to me about this move is that we’ve been moving into a realm where mobile is king, and most often, a trade-off for going mobile is losing some performance. Sandy Bridge is in all regards a more efficient architecture, so the fact that launch models will be equipped with quad-cores might give us a preview of just how power-efficient these things could be.
Or, it could be that people are doing a lot more on their mobile PCs, and need the power to back that up. Dual-cores once seemed drool-worthy, but today, with a countless number of multi-threaded applications out there, quad-cores really are making quite a difference.
The reasons behind the quad-core decision aren’t that important though, not when you realize that one of these launch models, Lenovo’s IdeaPad Y560p, is set to cost around $849 SRP. For a quad-core notebook, even a low-powered one, it gives us good reason to believe that this launch could be one of Intel’s most interesting.
And that’s the message that the PC industry is getting. “Quad-core goes live in January, dual-core goes live in February,” said an industry source involved in the Sandy Bridge laptop rollout. “OEMs [original equipment manufacturers–PC makers] are going to be going public with their quad-core laptops [at CES], but they can’t go public with their dual-core laptops until mid-February.”