A Symbolic King In A Crowd Full Of Value
When I first learned about the three processors Intel planned to launch, I petitioned the company at its own Developer Forum in San Francisco to sample the Core i7-3930K either in addition to or instead of the Core i7-3960X. "There is no way," I argued, "that the £800 model can come close to the value of a £480 SKU during a serious buying decision."
That didn’t happen, though, and as such, I can’t see any reason to recommend paying £800, plus the price of a cooling solution, plus a new motherboard, plus a quad-channel memory kit for Intel’s Core i7-3960X. Stepping down to the £480 Core i7-3930K really only costs you 3 MB of shared L3 cache—at a savings that’d cover a really nice motherboard and water cooler. That’s the processor enthusiasts with money (and an SSD full of threaded workloads) should be lusting over.
What about the Core i7-3820? I wouldn’t hold my breath. Expected in the first quarter of next year, Intel won’t yet comment on its price, though we assume it’ll be high $200s/low $300s (£200 - £275). The savings is nice, but it involves losing 2 MB of shared L3 cache, two cores, and the unlocked multiplier. Although six additional 100 MHz bins, plus some BCLK flexibility, will be available, you also have to remember that Ivy Bridge won’t be far off at that point.
Also slated to sell in quad-core configurations, Ivy Bridge-based CPUs will work in existing LGA 1155-equipped motherboards, they won’t necessitate new memory kits or coolers, and, depending on the IPC improvements Intel’s engineers extract, could wind up being faster than Sandy Bridge-E in software limited to eight threads or less.
If it’s value you seek, Sandy Bridge-E isn’t the platform for you. Ivy Bridge stands a much better chance of satisfying that niche. However, for the folks who bought into Bloomfield/Gulftown and skipped Sandy Bridge altogether in anticipation of today’s introduction, a marriage of the Sandy Bridge design, more cores, more cache, and more bandwidth yields impressive double-digit performance gains, on average.
Should we see PCI Express 3.0-capable hardware in the next couple of months, Sandy Bridge-E will have yet another opportunity to set itself apart. No other chipset includes this feature, and we expect graphics cards and RAID controllers to exploit it within the first half of 2012.
Just don’t feel compelled to splurge on the £800 Core i7-3960X. We’re trying to get our hands on a Core i7-3930K—there’s a good chance that’s the Sandy Bridge-E-based chip for savvy enthusiasts looking to overclock.
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Wow, I am so underwhelmed. My 2600K is looking better and better ha, ha. Yea there is an average performance increase of 17% over my 2600K but this CPU costs $1000 - honestly I don't get the $700 difference other than it MAY support PCI-E 3.0 (we don't know for sure). For those that use Premier Pro and ABBYY Fine Reader and other specific programs like them, then yes there is a real tangible benefit.
For gamers there is virtually no real benefit worth $700. It is entertainingly funny that SLI performance doesn't change much between the 2600K and the 3960X. The only real benefit to gamers will again be PCIE 3.0 support IF the Sandy Bridge E chips will support this.
I guess I was expecting more oomph from this new flagship. A measly 17% average performance increase over my $292.00 2600K makes me think that I have the best CPU available for the money. When we see how the new Sandy Bridge E CPUs overclock this may change greatly because there is every indication that they will be amazing overclockers. That coupled with PCI-E 3.0 capability may provide some separation between the Gen 2 and Gen 3 E CPUs.
Is it really that suprising though since they are the same cores? Nobody really expected much more than a marginal increase core for core, the difference in the platform comes with addition of those two extra cores (in the hexcore chips obviously) that are not available in the standard sandybridge package.
And, don't compare with the top end six core but the 3930 which offers far better value for money for those extra cores, extra cache and the platform advantage of 4 channel memory with a cheap 32GB option or more expensive 64GB option - again, something that is not available to the cheaper sandybridge platform.
Nobody knows what performance increase Ivybridge will bring, it may be great but will still be limited to four cores in the standard platform, hopefully Ivybridge-E wont take longer than this time next year and will offer at least a six core option if not eight core to the desktop if Intel don't decide to kill the two extra cores as they have done with the desktop sandybridge-e
Is the main selling point for this over the gulftown the improved energy efficiency?
The Visual Studio benchmark looks suspicious to me: A 6 core only showing a few percentages improvement vs a quadcore? What is the unit of time of that test, minutes or seconds? Compilation should be perfectly scalable (with the correct tools).
OK first of all, great article. Really enjoyed reading about the new processors. I was a bit miffed there wasn't a Cinebench score as Cinema4D is what I live in. I'll add those scores here for anyone interested.
Straight i7-3960X = 10.55
Overclocked = 12.31
Anyone into 3D and Cinema in particular will be looking at those figures and drooling. Is it worth the cash considering everything you need to buy if you render at home? not really. You can get close to a 10 score with an overclocked i7-2600k and the massive expense of a 3960 could see you building two or three 2600k boxes to get scores of close to 20 and 30 respectively. Of course that's only going to be meaningful to animation heads using separate machines to render different frames in an animation, but as that's really all they need, more cores, more gigahertz's, Intels latest offerings aren't priced right to attract them.
Looking at the cheaper chip, it still doesn't really make sense to go for it in a graphics workstation. You will get far more performance and value from just building the cheapest second 2600k box you can. A big shame really as it feels like we are doomed to a certain level of computing in one computer for at least the next two years with small percentage bumps along the way unless you're willing to go way out there on the money tree.
Intel are a bunch of meanie heads putting the prices of these so far out of reach of us peons.
Take heart, Ivy Bridge is coming out int 2012 and hopefully it will be the real-meal deal. I am somewhat stunned that my 2600K has such staying power. Except for the new PCI-E 3.0, I don't see much reason for upgrading my CPU.
Still, that being said, when you take a look at the performance increases on some specific programs they can be dramatic - some are as much as 50% faster than the 2600K. There is some real improvement in many areas with the 3960X.
Take heart, Ivy Bridge is coming out int 2012 and hopefully it will be the real-meal deal. I am somewhat stunned that my 2600K has such staying power. Except for the new PCI-E 3.0, I don't see much reason for upgrading my CPU.Still, that being said, when you take a look at the performance increases on some specific programs they can be dramatic - some are as much as 50% faster than the 2600K. There is some real improvement in many areas with the 3960X.
@flong I agree the top end chip especially is a beast. For the kind of work I do it would be a huge benefit but as I'm only a hobbyist at this, these prices can't be paid for by saying a next big budget job will pay for the new hardware as any real business could.
Also I think as even the Toms article points out, with the perspective change on the 2600k initially looking a bit of a miss up against the almost as good 2500k. Looking at it today the 2600k clearly shines when placed in line with these new chips. So it's less about the 2600k holding its own and more about Intel refusing to let us all at the good stuff in new hardware, instead concentrating on super high profit margins they can get from business.
I'm assuming the enthusiast and really anyone falling in the can only afford a 2600k market is quite small compared to where these 3960X's are being targeted so at least until that sector gets chips that are much faster again than the 3960X's, I don't really see Intel giving us anything significantly better for at least the next two years. Whatever launches next year can't really be as fast as a 3960X and priced just above a 2600k or it would invalidate the pricing structure they already have in place. So really how can you expect anything more than a few percent bump?
With AMD floundering around like sad fishes out of water, Intel just have no reason to really push the value.
"This news just in" Fire brigade saved the day at a local IT business today, the fire initially started when staff decided to cook their fried breakfasts on the AMD Bulldozer server cases instead of ordering out. Fireman Sam who was at the scene is urging others not to cook on AMD products but suggests heating sandwiches in bulldozer hot swappable drive bays is OK"
I think that Ivy Bridge is supposed be a step up from Sandy Bridge E, but I am really tired right now ha, ha.
I really don't why anyone is even the least bit surprised with the small performance increase of Intel's new extreme CPU.
People everywhere have always paid dearly for that last little bit of performance and it really doesn't matter whether we are talking about tennis rackets, fishing poles or technology!
The last 10% will always cost exponentially more than the first 90% .