Sandy Bridge and Overclocking

Some high frequency traders will utilize the latest sandy bridge and overclocking mechanism to increase the CPU power. with these technicals CPU clock frequency can be increased to 4.5GHz. One thing to note is that if not all your processes or threads are busy waiting, do not enable CPU power saving in your BIOS settings, otherwise thread switch will be slower when some of threads need to wake up.

Sandy Bridge or Ivy Bridge can again effectively increase CPU power by another 10% to 20%, comparing to previous CPU generation.

Intel Sandy Bridge

Sandy Bridge
Up to 17% more CPU performance clock-for-clock compared to Lynnfield processors.[20]
Around twice the integrated graphics performance compared to Clarkdale's (12 EUs comparison).

Ivy Bridge
Intel's performance targets (compared to Sandy Bridge):[21]
20% increase in CPU performance.
Up to 60% increase in integrated graphics performance.[22]

CPU Specification Comparison

Sandy Bridge				Ivy Bridge
Socket	Cores	Transistor count	Die size	Socket	Cores	Transistor count	Die size
LGA 1155	4	995 Million[23]	216 mm2	LGA1155	4	1.4 Billion[24]	~172 mm2[25]
	2 (6 EUs)	504 Million	131 mm2
	2 (12 EUs)	624 Million	149 mm2
LGA 2011	4/6/8			LGA 2011

Overclocking Cooling

more can be read from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Bridge for sandy bridge and http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Overclocking for overclocking