Leaked Ivy Bridge performance sneak peak, does it out bridge Sandy Bridge?

Personally, I think we're at the edge of where we'll see more performance from CPUs as games become more reliant on GPUs, console ports and better coding. Why would we require 12-cores at 4GHz each? When will it end?

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Well, Intel's Ivy Bridge is the next step for Intel, coming spring 2012. Chinese website Coolaler has gotten their mits on an engineering sample of Intel's 22nm-based Ivy Bridge platform. They've scored a quad-core chip, and have some screenshots of CPU-Z and Task Manager (without HyperThreading enabled).

AIDA64 Cache & Memory benchmarks have also been run. The chip is a 2GHz sample, with CPU-Z reporting it's running at 2.4GHz thanks to turbo boost (20-percent OC) on a Gigabyte GA-Z68X-UD7-B3 motherboard. What to expect? Roughly the same performance as current Sandy Bridge-based CPUs, but with ramped up northbridge and graphics core.

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Intel will squeeze more performance from the chip between now and release, but today is just a tease... a glimpse of what Intel are working with now and we should only expect good things from Ivy Bridge when it hits, in-particular, Ultrabooks.