Cinebench was particularly surprising because it gives us a good opportunity to look at single threaded FP performance. Compared to a similarly clocked Lynnfield(8MB L3 cache-i7 880), 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.


Sandy Bridge's FP performance is very good. Clock for clock we see a 15.6% improvement over Lynnfield (4C/4T vs. 4C/4T)- still compared with an 8MB L3 cache i7 880. Compared to the proposed similarly priced Core i5 760, the i5 2400 would be 29.5% faster.