The budget chip from Intel offers some funky features and speed increases.
We've had Intel's current highest-end chip (Core i7) for a very long time in the computing world, with nothing released in recent times that can really challenge that lead.
While the Sandy Bridge isn't likely to challenge it by huge amounts, it will still bring a whole host of improvements to the current CPU design and should offer clockspeed increases of up to 3.8GHz stock.
Not only are the new chips supposedly faster but they can also be so with a lower Thermal Design Power limit of only 85W - significantly lower than the current 130W.
Intel has also managed to pack in a lot of L3 cache into this new chip, which runs on a wide 256-bit memory bus to pump plenty of bandwidth to the new integrated graphics core built right onto the die.
This isn't going to be the chip to break huge performance benchmarks - but for sheer value uses it's going to be the one to watch.
Head over to Techpowerup for more, and a little snippet on the Core i9 octo-core CPU.
Issue: 133 | February, 2012