Intel's Next-Gen Sandy Bridge-E Extreme Chip to Boost Performance by 65%

This is some good news for us Workstation enthusiasts, now if the processor will also overclock like the 900 series we'll have a great tweaking processor as well.

According to a document with Intel's performance estimates of the Core i7-3960X processor (six cores, 3.30GHz, 15MB cache) seen by X-bit labs, the forthcoming chip for the LGA2011 platform is clearly faster than its predecessor Core i7-990X (six cores, 3.46GHz, 12MB cache) across a range of benchmarks despite of lower clock-speed amid the same amount of cores due to advantages of the Sandy Bridge micro-architecture over Nehalem/Westmere micro-architecture, quad-channel memory controller and other innovations.

I'm beginning to wonder what the difference is between X and K skus besides the L3 cache size.  According to the chart they both have unlocked multipliers and we already know 8 core CPUs will be "Xeon" branded for servers.  So, what does X mean?  Multi processor maybe?

Related Web URL: http://www.xbitlabs.com/news/cpu/display/201109072...