Intel will appreciate: while the first processor based on Sandy Bridge architecture are not expected on the market before 2011, the Chinese site Coolaler.com managed to get their hands on a preproduction model and engaged some initial tests and benchmarks.
Successor of Nehalem, Sandy Bridge architecture introduces new instructions for the record named VX (Advanced Vector Extensions), expected to take over the game SSE 4.2. It should eventually enable the development of processors with six cores and carrying a graphics controller, engraved in 32 nanometers as the rest of the chip (unlike the current Core iX).
The model obtained by Coolaler does not yet offer such a level of refinement. Here, it is a model with four cores showing a nominal frequency of 2.5 GHz (25 x 100 MHz). The chip, which adopts as agreed by the LGA-1155 socket, gets 6 MB shared L3 cache and uses Hyper Threading, which can have eight logical cores on Windows.
As for performance, the first processor from Sandy Bridge have recorded a score of 16.349 s in SuperPi 1M and 371 points CPUmark 99, tested with a configuration with 4 GB of DDR3 and a Radeon HD 5800. On Cinebench r11.5, which has the advantage of exploiting multi-core processors, the results are slightly lower than a Core i7 860. However, it would exceed the recent Core i7 965X test Photoworxx of Everest. At this stage, it remains difficult to draw any real conclusions from these figures.
