The Sandy Bridge Preview (Anand)

[xdan]

First of all, all this results are made with an i5 2400 which have just 6MB L3 cache, not 8MB L3 cache like his older brother i7 2600.
Another 2MB L3 cache may boost performance with an aditional 7-10%.
Even with 8 threads results aren't equal to i7 2600.
i5 2400 gain in performance is more to compare with i5 760.
Here are some numbers which are giving SB strong performance

In our Photoshop test it’s faster than its closest quad-core price competitor, faster than its identically clocked Lynnfield, faster than AMD’s fastest and loses out only to Intel’s $999 Core i7 980X. That being said, it only takes about 9% longer to complete our benchmark than the 980X.

Again i5 2400 almost = i7 980X.

Again i5 2400 almost - 980X.

This is also shocking .
Finally the overclocking problem...

First and foremost we have the K-series parts. These will be fully unlocked, supporting multipliers up to 57x. Sandy Bridge should have more attractive K SKUs than what we’ve seen to date. The Core i7 2600 and 2500 will both be available as a K-edition. The former should be priced around $562 and the latter at $205-216 i5 2500K(budget) if we go off of current pricing.

Secondly, some regular Sandy Bridge processors will have partially unlocked multipliers. The idea is that you take your highest turbo multiplier, add a few more bins on top of that, and that’ll be your maximum multiplier. It gives some overclocking headroom, but not limitless. Intel is still working out the details for how far you can go with these partially unlocked parts, but I’ve chimed in with my opinion and hopefully we’ll see something reasonable come from the company. I am hopeful that these partially unlocked parts will have enough multipliers available to make for decent overclocks. So if TURBO to i5 2500 is up to 3.7ghz than you may have multipliers up to 4ghz? And for i7 2600 which have TURBO up to 3.8GHZ , multipliers up to 4.2 ghz?

Finally, if you focus on multiplier-only overclocking you lose the ability to increase memory bandwidth as you increase CPU clock speed. The faster your CPU, the more data it needs and thus the faster your memory subsystem needs to be in order to scale well. As a result, on P67 motherboards you’ll be able to adjust your memory ratios to support up to DDR3-2133.
Some of the MB manufacuterers may add some features to motheboard to resolve in some way this problem- ex: UCC chip by Asrock when Amd thyed to kill unlocking with 890 chips.

Finaly price/performance ratio, if this i5 2400 will cost 180$, i5 2500- 200$ than we will see X6 1090T falling to 170$
Also the SB i3's i think they vill beat X4 925/945/955/965 given that i3 Clarkdale it's not to far away.
If the i5 2500K will cost 215$ than it would be avesome fro most of us.
The others cpu's i think that would overclock to 4-4.2ghz so it's decent.
And for extreme benches i think that at 6-6.2GHZ the performance boost will beat a 6.5ghz 980X( speaking about i7 2600K).
My quess is that clock per clock( with equal L3 cache) SB is 20% faster than Nehalem. So Buldozer will have hard time and even if it will slightly beat 1155 SB, it won't beat LGA 2011 EX SB( 8core, 20MB L3 cache). And Ivy Bridge is on road, 2012 so i can't see a way for Amd to beat Intel.