Lack of competition hurts any market. For example, with the departure of NVIDIA from Intel chipset maker list (solved by licensing NVIDIA IP for $1.5 billion), the semiconductor giant from Santa Clara slowed down the high-end roadmap. For example, the last performance chipset from Intel was launched in November 2008, i.e. exactly three years ago, while the mainstream chipset part went through a billion-dollar recall due to botched SATA controller. Every wait comes to an end, though. At IDF, Intel showed us what X79 and Sandy Bridge-E would be packing, and was met with quite a few mixed reactions as it simply didn't appear to be a big improvement over Sandy Bridge's P67/Z68 chipset. Today, we will be taking a look at both the X79 chipset and the processor when we review the DX79SI and Core i7 3960X processor. What question is, can Intel surprise?