How much faster is the Sandy Bridge over the Nehalem?

ambam

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I've got a Core i7 930 and an X58 motherboard. I could have waited for the SB, but it's the 8-core SB and socket 2011 I'm waiting for, and I didn't feel like waiting 1 1/2 years. I was curious how much faster the Core i7 "Sandy Bridge" processor is over the old "Nehalem." I heard the notebook SB actually outperforms the desktop Core i7 980X. :eek: :eek: :eek:

When are the 8-core SB processors and the socket 2011 motherboards coming out? How about AMD's 8-core bulldozers?
 

kkiddu

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AMD's Bulldozers will be launched sometime in June or July.

As for Sandy Bridge, clock for clock, it's about 20% faster than Nehalem. And it's damn easy to get a 4 GHz+ overclock on a K-series.
 

ambam

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Is it true that the notebook SB are faster than the desktop Nehalems?
 

20% sounds a bit much. I think the benefit is more like 10% or so, depending on the application. Honestly, it's not worth it if you already have an x58 system.
 

That's a slight exaggeration. They're an absolutely huge improvement over the old notebook i7s, but I don't think they can quite match the desktop i7s.
 

ambam

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Any word on the 8-core Sandy Bridge and socket "R" motherboards? This is allegedly a photo of the Ivy Bridge die. Is this real or a hoax?

ivy_bridge_2.jpg
 
The next chipset launch from Intel is supposedly sometime in Q4 2011.. Current Sandy Bridge processors are fast for sure but not enough to warrant an upgrade for someone running a LGA 1366/1156 rig.. There is plenty time for them to start looking old..
 

oby20

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your 930 is a good choice if you needed a pc that time, no reason for upgrading to sandy bridge if you already have i7 930, sandy bridge is faster but not better.
speed is just one of the many factorS to consider, and sandy bridge wins in that category, but it has many flaws, like less pcie lanes,
less memory support, no 6core support, the i7 9xx series are older but wins in that category, sandy bridge will outrun your i7930, but when heavily threaded apps that require more memory, your i7930 has more memory support so it will be more stable in running that app. if you will be buying a pc right now i think sandy bridge is a great choice, but if you will be buying a little late this year, better wait for the next gen i7.
 
going from a 930 to SB would make no sense nor have any improvement in anything.
Yes the 2600k is 15 percent faster than the I7 8xx series which it replaced. That's understandable. But if it takes a heavily overclocked 2600k to beat the 950 then it must tell you the clock per clock performance between the two. If they were on the exact same clocks and compared to each other who would win. No one can't really say coz most reviews decided to review the thing overclocked

?? The 2600K's base clock is 3.4GHz while the 950's is 3.06GHz. Both are quad-core, 8-thread CPUs with 1MB total L2 and 8MB L3, but the 2600K is dual-channel and the 950 is tri-channel memory. Anyway, if you look at the stock clock benches at http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/287?vs=100 you'll see that the 2600K ranges from about 17% to 38% faster in the benchmarks, with the sole exception of the Sysmark video creation, where it loses by a small percentage probably due to the tri-channel memory advantage for the 950. Clockspeedwise, the 2600K is some 11% faster than the 950, so if you wanna compare the two on IPC, it seems the 2600K would be some 6% - 27% faster clock for clock in all the benchmarks except for the above Sysmark video creation.
 

ambam

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OK correction OP if you run synthetic benchmarks all day you will get a 6 to 27 percent performance increase. In real world circumstances you get the same performance as you would now. But if you ever had a dream to touch 5hz with overclocking then the 2600k is your chance.

How does the SB perform against the Nehalem gaming-wise?
 

That's a GPU benchmark.

For pure CPU tasks, they fall behind in nearly every way. The few places that they come pretty close or pull ahead a bit is due to very aggressive turbo on single threaded tasks, which is easily offset with a mild overclock on the desktop parts. Don't get me wrong - notebook Sandy is very, very impressive, and the improvement is nothing short of monumental compared to prior generations. It just isn't quite as fast as a desktop i7.
 

cbrunnem

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ok fair enough lol. but in gaming they are competitive. kind of