Intel played their tick - tock strategy for a few years and it looks like they won’t be able to launch this part in Q4 2010 and make it in year 2010. We are sure Intel will tell us that the production starts in Q4 2010 but the availability will happen in Q1 2011.

Sandy Bridge is a new architecture, a step after Nehalem / Lynnfield / Clarkdale generation and it should bring more integration between graphics and CPU and generally make things faster.

It's in 32nm and you can expect a new graphics core as well as Turbo overclocking and continuation of the quite useless hyperthreading strategy. We can only hope that Intel will hire some people from Switzerland who are capable of fixing the broken tick - tock but kudos to Intel for being on time since summer 2006.