With the recent launch of Intel’s re-jigged HEDT processor lineup and the arrival of the X-series Core i7 and i9 model CPUs, it seems apt that this week’s Throwback Thursday is all about the arrival of another HEDT series - Sandy Bridge-E. Back in July 2011 the aging Gulftown platform was really beginning to creak, which is why so many of us were looking forward to getting hands on with an entirely new series of high-end parts based around the ground breaking Sandy Bridge architecture. Early rumors and leaks floating around certainly seemed to indicate that the new X79 platform would be a beast in pure performance terms. Here’s what we wrote on July 22nd 2011:

Slides of a key presentation to Intel's partners was leaked to sections of the media, which reveal Intel's own performance testing of the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition, the top-model of the socket LGA2011 "Sandy Bridge-E" processor series. Meet the family here. In its comparison, Intel maintained the Core i7-990X Extreme Edition socket LGA1366 processor as this generation's top offering.

From these test results, the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition is pitched to be about 47.25% faster on average, compared to Core i7-990X Extreme Edition. Intel is attributing the performance boost, apart from the normal IPC increase, to the 33% higher bandwidth thanks to the quad-channel DDR3 IMC, and the new AVX instruction set that accelerates math-heavy tasks such as encoding.

You can catch the full new article from July 2011 here, which as ever is worth a look just for the comments. You can also find the original newpost from TechPowerUp here.