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

by Hilbert Hagedoorn on: 03/22/2018 09:07 AM [

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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Retro review: Intel Sandy Bridge Core i7 2600K - 2018 review
It was 2011 when Intel released Sandy Bridge, so we grab Core i7 2600K and revisit it in the year 2018, apply Windows 10 and compare that Core i7 2600K towards Ryzen 1800X and Core i7 8700K through o...