Given the results that Intel's tick-tock has delivered so far, I'd say that Sandy Bridge is definitely worth waiting for if you can. From what I've read of Sandy Bridge, there is much to anticipate. From
http://techreport.com/discussions.x/19711 which references
http://realworldtech.com/page.cfm?Artic ... 1810191937 you can read the likes of
The Sandy Bridge CPU cores can truly be described as a brand new microarchitecture that is a synthesis of the P6 and some elements of the P4. Although Sandy Bridge most strongly resembles the P6 line, it is an utterly different microarchitecture. Nearly every aspect of the core has been substantially improved over the previous generation Nehalem. Many of these changes, such as the uop cache or physical register files, are drawn from aspects of or concepts behind the P4 microarchitecture. While the P4 was ultimately a flawed implementation, it embodied many good ideas – ideas that are reappearing across the industry, and in Sandy Bridge. The underlying philosophy of Intel’s approach to CPU design is to focus on maximizing per-core performance and efficiency.
So, yeah, I'd say the anticipation-meter is reading off the charts on Sandy Bridge - at least for me. Sandy Bridge may finally pull me over to Intel after sticking with AMD chips ever since my Athlon 800 some 10 years ago. I'm going to wait for Bulldozer to launch, just to give AMD a last chance, but, honestly speaking, I'm not expecting Bulldozer to be as good of a desktop processor as Sandy Bridge.
Edit: Here is what you can expect as a minimum from Sandy Bridge (I say as a minimum because Anand's reviewing the product far in advance of the actual launch, so Intel should be tweaking away at drivers and such)
http://www.anandtech.com/show/3871/the- ... s-in-a-row.
