Intel Sandy Bridge Preview
 

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.

http://www.anandtech.com/show/3871/t...ins-in-a-row/1

if AMD allows overclocking past Intel performance, we're good to go :)

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!