Sandy Bridge-E Upcoming CPUs Up to 65% More Powerful

Processors aimed at the enthusiast segment seem to be getting all sort of attention lately, especially those that haven't even arrived, like the Sandy Bridge-E line of Core i7 units that Intel is known to be preparing.

Though enthusiast-grade CPUs never really get bought by more than a handful of customers, they have a role beyond that of scoring massive benchmarking and frequency scores.

Basically, whoever has the most powerful CPU enjoys a certain prestige in the eyes of the worldwide IT market.

Advanced Micro Devices, for instance, is said to be working on K-series Llano APUs (accelerated processing units), with unlocked multipliers.

Meanwhile, Intel has the Sandy Bridge-E line, one which has now actually received some performance estimates.

All in all, there will be visible, even massive, performance improvements over the existing Extreme-series chips.

When comparing the Core i7-3960X to the Core i7-990X, things ran 13% better in Cinebench 1.5, 36% faster in 3DMark 11 (Physics test), 65% smoother in SPECfp (rate base 2006) and a full 92% better in Sandra 2011B/Memory Bandwidth FP sub-test.

What's more, a 111% improvement was seen in Sandra 2011B/Multi-Media FP sub-test, and there were other tests as well.

All in all, performance enthusiasts will enjoy an average of around 65% or so performance benefit, something that a six-core chip of 3.30 GHz and 15 B of cache might not necessarily hint at (especially with the six-core Core i7-990X featuring 3.46 GHz speed, albeit just 12 MB of cache).

In the end, it seems that the Nehalem/Westmere micro-architecture, and the quad-channel memory controller (among other things) are, indeed, massive perks.

At least three Sandy Bridge-E units will debut in Q4 of this year (2011). They will need Intel X79-based motherboards with the LGA 2011 socket.

The LGA 2011 lineup will receive new members at some point during the second quarter of 2012.