Computex 2010 saw numerous motherboard manufacturers showing off their 6-series chipset offerings for Intel’s new generation of Sandy Bridge based processors. The only thing missing was details on the new CPUs themselves.

Fortunately for all the tech junkies out there, an engineering sample has landed in the hands of Coolaler.com who has been kind enough to provide chip shots, as well as CPU-Z details and some quick benchmarks.

Sandy Bridge chips will be using the new LGA-1155 socket and based on the 32nm Westmere technology. We now know at least one processor will be a Quad Core with hyper-threading (8 threads) clocked at 2.5GHz. The chip has 256KB of L2 Cache per core and a shared 6MB L3 Cache. The chips still keep the integrated graphics, however the IGP is now built into the core, rather than a separate chip.

Sandy Bridge marks the start of Intel’s preparation for its eventual transition to the 22nm process, mapped for 2012

The benchmarking results show the expected results; falling under the faster clocked 2.8GHz i7 860 in Cinebench and completing a SuperPI 1M calculation in 16.349s, in line with similarly clocked Core i7 processors.

The launch is rumoured to be in early 2011, but with motherboard manufacturers already showing off retail grade products and engineering samples making their way out of the labs, one can’t help but wonder if that timeline has been accelerated .

Intel now has three completely separate desktop sockets and a dozen chipset lines all for three processor families using the same Core i3/i5/i7 tag. Do you feel this may cause confusion in the market and for everyday consumers?