Basic info about the Intel Sandy Bridge core

Sandy Bridge is the codename for the microarchitecture used in the "second generation" of the Intel Core processors (Core i7, i5, i3) - the Sandy Bridge microarchitecture is the successor to Nehalem microarchitecture. Intel demonstrated a Sandy Bridge processor in 2009, and released first products based on the architecture in January 2011 under the Core brand.
Sandy Bridge is manufactured in the 32 nanometer process, while Intel's subsequent generation Ivy Bridge (announced 2011) uses a 22 nanometer die shrink. This was known as the tick–tock model.
A Core i7 2600 Sandy Bridge CPU at 3.4 GHz with 1333 MHz DDR3 memory reaches 83 GFLOPS performance in the Whetstone benchmark and 118,000 MIPS in the Dhrystone benchmark.
It is the last Intel microarchitecture for which Windows Vista driver support officially exists.

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