Intel’s next generation 32nm successor of the current Nehalem generation, codenamed Sandy Bridge, has been taped out about a month ago, and Paul Otellini, the CEO of Intel was happy to show that to many journalists at IDF.

They claim that the CPU is an early revision but that it is on track to be launched in late 2010, probably around IDF 2010 time or a bit later.

This is a new architecture that should be better than Nehalem, and we expect up to eight cores, just enough to fight Bulldozer CPU from AMD that should arrive in early 2011. This will definitely be an interesting fight.