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What matters for consumers is that Sandy Bridge delivers at least four threads on Core i3 and four real, physical cores with Core i5 into the mainstream, at common price points and with top-notch features. Sure, AMD has been doing this aggressively as well. But with Sandy Bridge, we’re now looking at a performance level that can actually only be matched with six of AMD's Phenom II cores. At the same time, Sandy Bridge also matches the idle power consumption levels that so far were only reached by low-power processors or Atom-based systems. We’re talking about 30 W idle power paired with state-of-the-art quad-core performance.
If you don’t care for power consumption, then you will look at maximum performance per dollar, which remains important. There are great and, more importantly, much more affordable options in AMD’s portfolio. However, power consumption on Sandy Bridge is actually low enough to make even hardcore enthusiasts think twice. Isn’t it cool to have a machine capable running almost 5 GHz on air cooling that can actually switch off the CPU fan when the processor idles?
