Intel has demonstrated one of its new Sandy Bridge enthusiast desktop CPUs overclocked to 4.9GHz, with air-cooling only.
During a benchmarking session for media today in San Francisco, Intel demonstrated a Sandy Bridge CPU (which will be released in about three months, officially named "Second generation Intel Core processor" but still following the current i3/i5/i7 naming scheme) running at an incredible 4.9GHz.
Even more impressively, the system was air-cooled only -- no liquid cooling in sight.
Intel requested that we not disclose the original speed of the CPU before overclocking, as it is yet to announce the speeds that Sandy Bridge CPUs will ship at.
During the demo, which you can see below, an Intel spokesman observes that the benchmark result in Cinebench is faster than a 12 core AMD Opteron.
Dan Warne is attending IDF San Francisco as a guest of Intel.