We are lagging a little bit behind the official media embargo date for Intel's new Sandy Bridge processors and honestly, all of the information shown below on this page has been released or leaked previously by Intel, so there should be no real surprises here. LINK
The "Sandy Bridge" processors we are seeing here today are Intel's second generation of "Core" processor that will be represented under the brand names of Intel Core i3, Core i5, and Core i7.
Sandy Bridge however represents mostly Intel's mainstream line of processors with the Sandy Bridge Core i7 moving somewhat into Intel's Performance processor lineup. The current LGA 1366/X58 platform will remain at the top of the stack throughout 2011.
Like the previous Westmere generation of processor, Sandy Bridge will too be a 32nm process part. It does however have a very new microarchitecture that builds on the previous Nehalem and Pentium 4 architectures. Big gains in Instruction Per Clock and energy efficiency will be obvious once you see our application benchmarks and power testing.
Sandy Bridge also represents a true "Fusion" processor, much like AMD has been touting for years. Sandy Bridge has truly integrated the processor core(s), the graphics core(s), the memory controller, and the PCI-E bus controller. All of these are on the same die package, manufactured at the same process size, one complete unit unlike the previous Clarkdale processors we have seen that were somewhat cobbled together, yet still impressive.
Many of you have heard by now that Sandy Bridge processors will not be "overclockable" in terms of altering the BCLK, and for the most part, that is true. We have yet to see successful overclocks of the BCKL of more than 6MHz (106MHz). That does not amount to much if your multiplier is locked at 35, or whatever it may be.
Intel is leaving the enthusiast with two outs, and these will be "K" series processors. These K series processors will have unlocked multipliers, making overclocking these processors extremely easy with the correct motherboard. There will be two K parts initially, a 2500K and a 2600K. The 2500K is an i5 part that has 4 cores with no HyperThreading feature. The 2600K is an i7 part that has 4 cores featuring HyperThreading allowing for 8 threads to be run simultaneously. The 2500K is looking to cost around $215 street, while the 2600K is looking to cost around $320 street, although we have not seen any in retail quite yet. We are expecting supply in about a week.
Given that these are the only two processors that our audience is likely to be concerned with, these are the two we are going to focus on here today. We will not be looking at the integrated graphics capabilities of these processors, as we do not think these capabilities will be important to our readers either. We are sure other sites will be looking into this, we still however highly suggest a discrete graphics card for true gamers.
Below is Intel's full slide kit given to us that has been online for weeks now. Feel free to scroll through it, there is of course a lot of information that I have not mentioned here.
