Intel Sandy Bridge Preview

@ 2010/08/29
With Sandy Bridge, Intel integrated the clock generator, usually present on the motherboard, onto the 6-series chipset die. While BCLK is adjustable on current Core iX processors, with Sandy Bridge it’s mostly locked at 100MHz. There will be some wiggle room as far as I can tell, but it’s not going to be much. Overclocking, as we know it, is dead.


Cinebench was particularly surprising because it gives us a good opportunity to look at single threaded FP performance. Compared to a similarly clocked Lynnfield, Sandy Bridge can deliver 11% better performance. Compared to a similarly positioned Lynnfield, Sandy Bridge is about 20% faster. Note that this is without turbo enabled. The retail 3.1GHz chip should turbo up to 3.4GHz in this test, giving it a 9.6% frequency boost.

Comment from jmke @ 2010/08/30
the K series of Sandy will come unlocked, and they are the same price as current Core i3/i5, the locked will be cheaper;

not sure if AMD has something that can beat the single threaded performance of this CPU, just look at how much faster it is clock for clock... impressive!
Comment from geoffrey @ 2010/08/30
if AMD allows overclocking past Intel performance, we're good to go