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owl [soylentnews.org] writes:

Processor companies typically iterate off proven designs, and for good reason. Changing too many things at once introduces a lot of risk. A lot of changing parts makes it hard to get a good picture of overall performance, so it also makes tuning difficult. Pentium 4 and Bulldozer made clean breaks from prior architectures, and both were unsuccessful designs. But sometimes, making a clean break does pay off.

Sandy Bridge is one such case. It inherited architectural features from Intel’s prior P6 and Netburst architectures, but can’t be considered a member of either line. Unlike Netburst, Sandy Bridge was so successful that Intel’s high performance cores to this day can trace their lineage to back to it. In the early 2010s, Sandy Bridge was so successful that Intel went completely unchallenged in the high end CPU market. And as a testament to the architecture’s solid design, Sandy Bridge CPUs still deliver enough performance to remain usable across a range of everyday tasks.

Original Submission