While Intel is still a few weeks away from releasing Sandy Bridge performance numbers at IDF, we managed to spend some time with a very healthy sample and run it through a few of our tests to get a sneak peak at what's coming in Q1 2011.
Sandy Bridge puts all current integrated graphics solutions to shame, and even looks to nip at the heels of low end discrete GPUs. For HTPC users, Clarkdale did a good enough job - but for light gaming there wasn't enough horsepower under the hood. With Sandy Bridge you can actually play modern titles, albeit at low quality settings. The fact that you can get Radeon HD 5450 performance for free with a Core i5 2400 is just awesome.
With no quad-core 32nm desktop parts on the market today, Sandy Bridge only needs to beat Lynnfield to be more power efficient - which it does very well: Idle power remains unchanged, but load power is much lower at the same clock and even within the same price target.
Sandy Bridge seems to offer a 10% increase in performance. Keep in mind that this analysis was done without a functional turbo mode, so the shipping Sandy Bridge CPUs should be even quicker. I'd estimate you can add another 3 - 7% to these numbers for the final chips. That's not bad at all for what amounts to a free upgrade compared to what you'd buy today. Power consumption will also see an improvement. Not only will Sandy Bridge be noticeably quicker than Lynnfield, it'll draw less power.
The high end Sandy Bridge parts don't arrive until the second half of 2011 which add more cores and more memory bandwidth.
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