A few hours ago were shown some tests results of Sandy Bridge-E processor.
In particular, Intel reaffirmed its support of PCI Express 3.0. Currently in the process of validation - Intel has already provided samples to its partners in the development of PCI Express 3.0, including AMD and NVIDIA, as well as motherboards manufacturers .
In retail the processor will come without a cooling system. This decision was made taking into account that buyers of such products prefer to choose the required cooling system .
Here is a sample system based on Sandy Bridge-E.
Six-core processor Intel Core i7-3960X, equipped with four-channel memory controller. According to preliminary data, default frequency 3.3 GHz, and Turbo Boost mode will overclock it to 3.9 GHz.
Given the evidence of frequencies, the amount of cache memory, and enhancements that differentiate the architecture of Nehalem (Core i7-990X) from Sandy Bridge-E, you can roughly estimate the magnitude of new processor superiority in 30-100%, depending on the task . Tests confirm this assessment. In SPEC CPU 2006 integer operations superiority was approximately 30% in floating point operations - 60%. In the test, Sandra 2011b, associated with multimedia data processing , the deference has increased to almost 100%. Approximately with the same amount the new processor surpassed its rival in the memory test using SSE2 commands. Note that both test systems have the same memory amount , but in the case of Intel Core i7-3960X memory worked in four-channel configuration.