Intel Sandy Bridge Quad-Core Processor Gets Benchmarked

At Computex so many motherboards where showing that it is only likely that Intel handed out Engineering samples to ODMs, and dsometimes that menas the processor leak to a website. And this time that is Coolaler

Coolaler tested an early sample LGA1155 quad-core processor operating at 2.5 GHz, which CPU-Z can't name is tagged as a Sandy Bridge engineering sample.

Among the little that's known about this processor, is that it has a base clock speed of 100 MHz (Nehalem/Westmere processors use BClk of 133 MHz), which means that to achieve 2.5 GHz, it uses a multiplier value of 25. It has all the instruction sets of Westmere including SSE 4.2 and AES acceleration, but also features AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions), a successor to SSE 4.2 which expands the processor's number crunching abilities, and increases performance per MHz.

The cache aches up to L2 are the same (32 KB L1I, 32 KB L1D, 256 KB /core L2), but uses a smaller L3 cache at 6 MB (compared to 8 MB on Lynnfield). HyperThreading technology provides the OS with 8 logical CPUs to deal with.  The results are a little so-so really. But with a release next year, the validity of the tests obiously is .. fragile.

Coaler tested with 4 GB of DDR3 memory and ATI Radeon HD 5800 series graphics. The processor crunched Super Pi 1M in 16.349 s, it scored 371 points in CPU Mark.

Cinebench R11.5 benchmarkshowed performance a little under Core i7 860 (reference score). In the Everest CPU Queen, it's about as fast a Core i5 750. In the Photoworxx test, it outperformed the Core i7 965 XE. In a separate set of tests run on the same hardware albeit in Windows XP, the processor was eight times faster than any other processor in the AES test (because of its native AES extensions), and edged the Core i7 965 XE in memory bandwidth despite having a narrower dual-channel DDR3 IMC.

Anyway, have a look here for more benchies and photo's.