The CPUZ and Everest screenshots show an “A2” stepping, dual core, four thread, Sandy Bridge processor.

So whats new? First of all and most importantly, the socket. While the socket looks pretty much identical to an LGA1156 socket, it’s not. Sandy Bridge will use the VRM 13 spec, which means it needs a PWM (power management) redesign and won’t work in older LGA1156 mainboards, while current socket LGA1156 CPUs won’t work in the new socket LGA1155 boards. Note how the CPU socket is actually labeled 115X. Maybe Intel will decide to remove a few pins shortly before the launch just as they did with the LGA1156 socket to confuse everybody once again.

The block is 100MHz instead of 133MHz and we heard confirmation that this time around Intel finally managed to get rid of the ck505 on the boards, something Intel wanted to do on socket LGA1366 already. This means all the clocks are created and managed internally, which has overclockers worried. According to rumors Sandy Bridge (115X) won’t overclock as nicely as Bloomfield (1366), Gulftown (1366), Lynnfield (1156) or Clarkdale (1156) processors, which have a default base clock of 133MHz and reach 200MHz with aircooling easily and up to 240MHz if you’re lucky.

The cache structure has apparently been updated and tweaked as well. Compared to Intel’s latest 32nm Clarkdale processor Sandy Bridge has double the L1 Instruction cache width, 8-way versus 4-way, a smaller L3 cache of only 3MB versus 4MB, and a narrower L3 cache interface of only 12-way associativity versus 16-way.

It also supports AVX, an evolution of SSE which is going to replace that and doubles the vector registers’ width from 128-bit to 256-bit.

This should boost the processor’s floating-point performance, which is actually something games seem to like, but it is mostly aimed at the scientific field and is somewhat of a secret weapon for Intel against GPGPU. While Linux already supports AVX, Windows doesn’t. Windows 7 SP1 is supposed to support it, but that’s still at least a couple of months away and should come out at the end of the year. Which is another hint at the Christmas season.

And don’t expect a notable performance boost. This is pretty much the same step Intel has taken in its Atom CPU lineup from Diamondville to Pine View, that is, shrinking the chipset and merging it into the CPU core, so the main focus is cost and power consumption. While AVX should improve floating-point performance, which games do like, we don’t know whether the new registers will boost the performance of SSE code in current games as well, or if so by how much.

Where Sandy Bridge will be very interesting is in the mobile segment, which is where Intel is apparently planning to launch these chips first. This makes a lot of sense as Clarkdale in its mobile incarnation called Arrandale has so far failed to replace Intel’s CULV lineup, with UM processors nowhere to be found and laptops based on it being delayed with no ETA. There have been hints from industry insiders that Intel couldnt get Arrandale power consumption low enough, not at reasonable yields at least, and has told its customers to wait for a couple of months. It might just skip the ultra low voltage Arrandales and go for Sandy Bridge instead.