Some slides created for the purposes of a key presentation to Intels partners have leaked out which reveal in-house performance testing of Intel's future top dog in the LGA2011 based Sandy Bridge E family of processors that so many of us are holding out for.

That processor is the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition, a six-core (12 thread) CPU clocked in at 3.30GHz, with a Turbo Boost speed of up to 3.90GHz and 15MB of L3 cache.

For comparative purposes, the slides include Intel's current top offering, the LGA1366 based Core i7-990X Extreme Edition and quite the array of tests were used including Cinebench 11.5, POV-Ray 3.7, 3DMark 11 physics, Pro-Show Gold 4.5, SPECint_rate base2006, SPECfp_rate base2006, and SiSoft SANDRA 2011B multimedia and memory bandwidth.

The results indicate an overall average performance increase of around 47% when compared to the 990X. Intel attests that the gains are mostly due to the 33% higher bandwidth on tap from the quad-channel DDR3 IMC along with the new AVX instruction set designed to accelerate math-heavy tasks like encoding.

Hopefully we'll see the Core i7-3960X's release a little later this year - worst case it will be early next.