Sandy Bridge question

[Ihaveworms]

So I am thinking about possibly upgrading my machine to an i7. There really isn't much I want for christmas and I wouldn't mind having an even faster machine. I was looking at the asus p6t v2 (x58). Is sandy bridge likely to be another socket completely? Would it be unlikely to even run on a x58? Just wondering if it is worth the wait or should I enjoy what I can get now.

 

[USMC2Hard4U]

In my personal belief and what the past has shown, there will be a new socket and new chipset for Sandy Bridge lol

 

[DanNeely]

I tend to lean towards a new socket myself. IIRC all sandy bridge chips will have an on die GPU; 1366 doesn't have video out pins; so unless they push the signal out to the northbridge via QPI and have the neccesary connections to a DVi/etc port there a new socket will be needed.

1156 has support for on chip video; but the DMI bus in its current incarnation is essentially end of life. It's only got the bandwidth of 4 PCIe 1.0 lanes which just isn't enough to support widespread use of SATA6GB or USB3 which could use about 50/25% of the total bandwidth of the bus per device. It's possible that Intel will clock DMI up faster to support newer peripherals; but I think it's more likely that they'll push QPI out to the rest of their product line. Probably just as soon as the ink is dried on a DMI only license to nVidia. The latter might just be my cynicism showing though.

Beyond that integrating a memory controller onto the chip limits socket longevity by tieing more implementation details into it. See s775 vs S754/939/AM2/AM2+/AM3( or did this postdate 1366?)

 

[ilkhan]

And its my belief that the sandybridge socket will support current s1156 chips, but sandy bridge chips won't fit in s1156 sockets.

in other words, Intel has said yet.

 

[aamsel]

I tend to lean towards a new socket myself. IIRC all sandy bridge chips will have an on die GPU; 1366 doesn't have video out pins; so unless they push the signal out to the northbridge via QPI and have the neccesary connections to a DVi/etc port there a new socket will be needed.

1156 has support for on chip video; but the DMI bus in its current incarnation is essentially end of life. It's only got the bandwidth of 4 PCIe 1.0 lanes which just isn't enough to support widespread use of SATA6GB or USB3 which could use about 50/25% of the total bandwidth of the bus per device. It's possible that Intel will clock DMI up faster to support newer peripherals; but I think it's more likely that they'll push QPI out to the rest of their product line. Probably just as soon as the ink is dried on a DMI only license to nVidia. The latter might just be my cynicism showing though.

Beyond that integrating a memory controller onto the chip limits socket longevity by tieing more implementation details into it. See s775 vs S754/939/AM2/AM2+/AM3( or did this postdate 1366?)

I am guessing from this that dropping an aftermarket SATA 6/USB 3 controller (such as the one ASUS is planning) into a
socket 1366 will create a kludge of its own in terms of bandwidth? If so, then taking a current 1366 motherboard, and adding
a 3rd party SATA 6/USB 3 chip would be no better. Is it safe to say that 1366 will be unable to properly handle such demands,
It is a given that 1156 has less overall bandwidth than 1366, but not by a factor that would help this situation much, correct?

 

[DanNeely]

The x58 has 36 2.0 lanes and 6 1.0 lanes vs the p55's 16 and 8; and loads of bandwidth between the CPU and NB via QPI. This gives a mobo designer a lot more room to play with. Sticking USB3/SATA6 on the southbridge would still be a poor idea, and not just because things like the firewire controller, pata controller, extra sata ports controller, and non-intel nic chips are already chewing up most of the 1.0 lanes. Sacrificing the x4 slot on the NB won't cost much in terms of functionality, your choices for high speed slots become 16/16, 16/8/8, 8/8/8/8 or 16/8/4/4, vs 16/16/4 or 16/8/8/4 which will impact very few people since GPUs remain minimally to not at all bottlenecked at 8x bandwidth and very few people go beyond 2 cards anyway. On the extreme H2O front the cost of an extra $50 for an nv200 chip to add lanes is negligible vs 4 $500 GPUs.

Alternately a new chipset could be made with the SATA6/USB3 ports attached directly to the NB, or the x68 chipset (wag at name) could be a single chip solution as well assuming the pinout isn't prohibitively high.

 

[aamsel]

The x58 has 36 2.0 lanes and 6 1.0 lanes vs the p55's 16 and 8; and loads of bandwidth between the CPU and NB via QPI. This gives a mobo designer a lot more room to play with. Sticking USB3/SATA6 on the southbridge would still be a poor idea, and not just because things like the firewire controller, pata controller, extra sata ports controller, and non-intel nic chips are already chewing up most of the 1.0 lanes. Sacrificing the x4 slot on the NB won't cost much in terms of functionality, your choices for high speed slots become 16/16, 16/8/8, 8/8/8/8 or 16/8/4/4, vs 16/16/4 or 16/8/8/4 which will impact very few people since GPUs remain minimally to not at all bottlenecked at 8x bandwidth and very few people go beyond 2 cards anyway. On the extreme H2O front the cost of an extra $50 for an nv200 chip to add lanes is negligible vs 4 $500 GPUs.

Alternately a new chipset could be made with the SATA6/USB3 ports attached directly to the NB, or the x68 chipset (wag at name) could be a single chip solution as well assuming the pinout isn't prohibitively high.

Great information, thanks, but still a bit confused:
Using an 1156 setup with a single GPU, would bandwidth likely be an issue either in the manner that Gigabyte and ASUS have tossed the NEC USB 3.0 chip onto their designs, or with an add-on card such as ASUS is supposedly going to offer for $30 adding USB 3.0/SATA 6.0?

In other words, as someone who will only ever use a single GPU, what difference would exist between such interim implementation on socket 1156 vs 1366?

 

[Zero82z]

Great information, thanks, but still a bit confused:
Using an 1156 setup with a single GPU, would bandwidth likely be an issue either in the manner that Gigabyte and ASUS have tossed the NEC USB 3.0 chip onto their designs, or with an add-on card such as ASUS is supposedly going to offer for $30 adding USB 3.0/SATA 6.0?

In other words, as someone who will only ever use a single GPU, what difference would exist between such interim implementation on socket 1156 vs 1366?

If you're using a single GPU, you shouldn't have anything to worry about.

 

[mistachewey]

what about single gpu, but with two raid cards

the msi p55 gd65 has a second pcix16 slot that works as x8 when occupied.

would the gfx card being bumped down to 8x impact performance alot?

 

[Zero82z]

what about single gpu, but with two raid cards

the msi p55 gd65 has a second pcix16 slot that works as x8 when occupied.

would the gfx card being bumped down to 8x impact performance alot?

The performance impact depends on which video cards you are using. You might see a difference at higher resolutions with high-end cards like the 5870, GTX295, or 5970.