The Sandy Bridge processor--to be announced January 5--will pack media acceleration circuitry, Stephen L. Smith, vice president and director of PC Client operations and enabling at Intel... Sandy Bridge will support DirectX 10.1 and OpenCL 1.1--the latter used on Apple's Mac operating systems... Certain graphics chips from Advanced Micro Devices and Nvidia already support DirectX 11... Smith also reiterated that Intel is on track to deliver the 22-nanometer Ivy Bridge silicon--the follow-on to Sandy Bridge--by the end of 2011... also repeated that Intel has invested "six to eight billion dollars to equip up to four factories for 22-nanometer production." ...A...