First Intel Pentium Sandy Bridge Benchmarks Make Appearance

Even though the first Pentium processors based on the Sandy Bridge architecture won't become official until May 22, a few benchmarks detailing the performance of the new chips have already made their way onto the Web and suggest that the CPUs are a great deal faster than their predecessors.

The benchmarks appear to have been taken out of an Intel official presentation and compared the chips with two second-generation Core i3 processors, as well as with a Pentium E3400 Wolfdale CPU.

To make the comparison as fair as possible, the Pentium E3400 is pitted against the upcoming Pentium G620.

Both CPUs pack dual processing cores, without HyperThreading support, and come clocked at 2.6GHz, but the G620 features a larger amount of cache memory.

The G620 proved to be faster in all the four test scenarios, and its lead varied between 26% and 74%.

The same Sandy Bridge Pentium processor was then tested against two Core i3 CPUs, the 2100 and the 2105.

These also feature a dual core design, but pack Hyper Threading support, come clocked at 3.1GHz, and the Core i3-2105 also features the Intel HD 3000 graphics core.

As expected, the Pentium chip lagged behind its older brothers, but, surprisingly enough, the differences were kept to a minimum and were most probably influenced by the higher frequencies of the Core i3 processors.

Outside of the G620, Intel's Sandy Bridge Pentium lineup will include tree other processors, the 2.8GHz G840, the 2.9GHz G850 and the low power G620T, which is expected at a latter date.

The prices of the three chips available at launch were set at $64, $75 and $85, respectively.



All the chips will feature integrate graphics based on a cut-down version of the Intel HD 2000 GPU, have a TDP of 65W (except for the G620T) and lack Hyper-Threading and Turbo Boost support as well as the AES, AVX and Quick Sync technologies. (via Donanim Haber)