That's a lot to digest: Intel's general CPU strategy follows a tick-tock pattern; the company unveils alternating successions of brand-new microarchitectures and improvements for its product cycles. Sandy Bridge is the former: a brand-new chunk of CPUs with a new socket, new chipsets, and new technologies that are designed to push Intel to the next echelon of computing performance.

Of all the changes present in Sandy Bridge--including Intel's final push to unify its desktop and mobile lines under an identical 32-nanometer production process, none are perhaps as remarkable as the company's integration of a graphics processing unit directly onto the die of some Sandy Bridge processors. These should be able to double the performance of Intel's current integrated graphic lineup. But that's not all: neighbor to the GPU is an upgraded video processing unit that dedicates actual silicon to encoding and decoding videos, improving the performance of both.

But before we get too far into the raw technical details, here's what Intel's been able to let loose in regards to the actual lineup of chips heading out the door in early January. The company hasn't dropped its "Core" designation for its CPU lineup: You'll still see Core i3, i5, and i7 branded chips on the market. The number immediately following the "i" modifier-a "2"-will indicate that said CPU is a part of the Sandy Bridge family, as it's a second-generation CPU. Three more numbers will indicate the specific processor SKU, and a letter possibly appended to the end-"K," "S," or "T"-will detail whether the CPU is unlocked for overclocking, optimized for "lifestyle" computing, or optimized for power-savings.

As you might expect, you won't be able to slap a second-generation Core processor into your current system.The new Intel socket for Sandy Bridge is LGA-1155, and you'll find it paired on motherboards that are themselves based on three new chipsets: the performance-focused P67, the integrated graphics-focused H67 (click the diagram for a larger view), and the entry-level H61.

Turning back to the Sandy Bridge CPUs themselves, we mentioned that the addition of an on-die GPU is a pretty big step for Intel-a step up from the Clarkdale design, Intel's first GPU/CPU combination. While you won't be able to run chips that beat the best of Nvidia or ATI's discrete cards, Intel boasts that the new execution units present in its Sandy Bridge GPU not only come at more than twenty times the power of Intel's Generation-5 graphics, but that the cards themselves should rival integrated (and even entry-level discrete) graphics from Nvidia and ATI.