While many will take these numbers with a grain of salt since they came direct from Intel, it's not hard to believe how strong performing Intel's Sandy E is up against its old aged X58/LGA1366 predecessor, and with the (quite disappointing) benchmarks out on Bulldozer, it only puts AMD in an even dimmer light.

Intel has shared some internal test results of its soon to be launched Core i7 3960X Extreme Edition processor; a six cored / 12 threaded beast clocked in at 3.3GHz with 15MB of cache. The results were directly compared to the top dog in Intel's current flagship platform, the Core i7 990X EE, which runs a stock clock of 3.46GHz.

A breakdown of all the results can be read via the source link below, but to summarize here, the i7 3960X looks to be about 15% quicker on average. Its best improvement was actually seen in 3DMark 11's Physics test where it bested the Core i7 990X by 36%. And throughout the tests there was one particular standout attribute; its memory benchmarks where it left the 990X for dead over and over and scored up to 111% better in some instances.

Only 1 month to go!