Retro review: Intel Sandy Bridge Core i7 2600K - 2018 review

Processors 199 Page 2 of 24 Published by

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Sandy Bridge processors

A bit of History

Sandy Bridge was the first generation of processors for socket 1155 and shared a lot of innovation including an IGP and ring bus design. To date, the ring bus design is used processors up-to but not including high-end Skylake-X which moved towards its mesh structure. Let's do the steps and inter architecture name changes, as there have been seven steps:


Westmere Core i Tick 32 nm 2010
Sandy Bridge Core i 2xxx Tock 32 nm 2011
Ivy Bridge Core i 3xxx Tick 22 nm 2012
Haswell Core i 4xxx Tock 22 nm 2013
Broadwell Core i 5xxx Tick 14 nm 2014 & 2015 for desktops
Skylake Core i 6xxx Tock 14 nm 2015
Kabylake  Core i 7xxx Tock 14 nm 2016
Coffee lake Core i 8xxx TOCK 14 nm 2017

Sandy Bridge was a completely new architecture. The overall processor performance staggered us all and inside the die, merged deeply in there, we spotted this new thing, an integrated GPU with twice the performance of the last generation we saw from Clarkdale processors. It was an improvement in the low-end segment. There was more though, we noticed a new AVX instruction set extension and also spotted an updated Turbo engine allowing much more efficient per core performance and clock frequencies. Finally, power consumption was another factor that was addressed.  Paired with Sandy bridge came new motherboard chipsets, ten in total of which five were intended for desktop processors, namely the P67, H67, Q65, Q67, and B65. The P67 chipset was targeted at performance and enthusiast end users allowing tweaking and providing performance features.

The Architecture

The previous Clarkdale processors had a 45nm GPU and a 32nm CPU core placed onto one chip package, the Sandy Bridge architecture came together and merged these two parts on die based on a 32nm fabrication node. SB (Sandy Bridge) Core i5 and i7 based processors have four physical (execution) CPU cores each capable of one hyper-thread (making 4 physical cores and 8 logical cores hyper-threaded). SB features Intel Turbo Boost which had been further developed and is now at revision 2.0.


Intel Core i5 2500K and Core i7 2600K

The Core i7 SB processors feature 8MB of Intel Smart Cache and an Integrated Memory Controller (IMC) that supports 


I've created a table where you can observe all primary specifications and prices at the time of launch, have a look.

Branding Core i5 Core i5 Core i5 Core i7 Core i7
Processor 2400 2500 2500K 2600 2600K
Price $184 $205 $216 $294 $317
TDP 95W 95W 95W 95W 95W
Cores / Threads 4/4 4/4 4/4 4/8 4/8
Frequency GHz 3.1 3.3 3.3 3.4 3.4
Max Turbo GHz 3.4 3.7 3.7 3.8 3.8
DDR3 MHz 1333 MHz 1333 MHz 1333 MHz 1333 MHz 1333 MHz
L3 Cache 6MB 6MB 6MB 8MB 8MB
Intel HD Graphics 2000 2000 3000 2000 3000
GPU Max freq 1100 MHz 1100 MHz 1100 MHz 1350 MHz 1350 MHz
Hyper-Threading No No No Yes Yes
AVX Extensions Yes Yes Yes Yes Yes
Socket LGA 1155 LGA 1155 LGA 1155 LGA 1155 LGA 1155

The Sandy Bridge cache memory consists of a 32KB L1 Data cache, 32KB Instruction cache (= 64KB L1) and then we spot a 256KB L2 cache per core. Then there's an L3 cache that is shared in-between the CPU cores which is 8MB in total for the Core i7 2600 processors and 6MB for the Core i5 2500. The L3 cache sits in the physical form of a ring bus. Thus the L3 cache can be used by the processor cores and also the graphics core. This all still sounds very familiar eh?

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