Some internal slides from intel leaked earlier yesterday they detail Intel's performance estimates for its upcoming high-end enthusiasts processors.

The slides compare the Core i7 990X with the upcoming Sandy Bridge-E architecture, the Core i7-3960X, both six-core processors and both running at a 130W TDP.

Both chips come clocked at different base and Turbo Boost frequencies (3.46GHz base and 3.73GHz Turbo for the 990X vs. 3.30GHz base and 3.90GHz Turbo for the 3960X), while also sporting different feature sets and L3 cache size.

The Core i7-3960X  packs 15MB of Level 3 cache memory as well as support for the new AVX instructions set and a quad-channel memory controller.

Just as Intel points out in its slides, all of these improvements can bring quite a noticeable performance in applications that are memory bond or if AVX instructions are being used.

In the real world, however, the performance gains aren't as impressive as those observed in synthetic benchmarks and these seem to hover between 12 and 15 percent, the only area where the 3960X can detach itself being