News - Intel i7 “Ivy Bridge-E” about 10pc faster than current offerings

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Chinese overclockers get hands on a pre-launch Core i7-4960X sample to test.

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have home processors reached their pinacle until software catches up?...i wonder

The gains won't blow our socks off but they do mean that IVB-E is a better candidate for a workstation than Haswell, which, with 4 cores, was catching up with SB-E's 6 cores. The power savings of Haswell might have made them equal on the shortlist for some but IVB-E will raise that bar as well.

10% is quite sturdy, but I'd have to see how well they OC before considering.

The 100MHz could be expected to account for a 2.85% up bump if my math is correct even if no other improvements were there.

Noteworthy that this is probably a comparison between current top of range (70X) and future second in range (60X), so perhaps not a fair ££ equal comparison. 3960X-3970X gains you 200MHz base clock so we might expect a 4970X to be 3.8GHz, so another ~5-6% on top of the 4960X results.

This isn't exactly a full suite of benchmarks either so there might be other cases with bigger gains but I wouldn't expect so Ivy-Bridge E is just a die shrink of SB-E though right, so massive gains not to be expected and there might be other benefits like lower TDP, SB-E is 130W so could do with a drop! Intel are probably more focussed on TDP and cost than outright performance given that they are already waaaaaay ahead of AMD in most benchmarks already.

It's rarely of benefit to upgrade CPU every generation anymore, every 2-3 generations at least!

Hmmm I'm on an i7 860 at the moment running at 3.85GHz (up from 2.8) on air with a megahalems.

I am CPU bottlenecked in a game I dearly love at the moment, and would be very interested to upgrade CPU, but the incremental improvements seem to be rather disappointing. It's the lack of decent competition at the high end, unfortunately :(

Think I'll wait until the PS4 is out (I hate console games, but they will have impact on the whole gaming sector), Haswell is out and this is on the shelves. That should give me a better idea of overclockability of these chips (or Haswell). Ivy Bridge just seems so disappointing compared with Sandy Bridge - the base speed is creeping up, but the overclocking potential isn't going up at nearly the same rate :(

Interesting that it's ivy bridge-e and not haswell-e it's kinda counter intuitive to high your top end product a generation behind particularly when you use the same numbering system. It should be the other way around! As even now there are cases where an ib 3000 series out performs a sb-e 3000 series.

What was the gain from sandy to ivy bridge (clock for clock) from memory it wasn't much and haswell is pretty similar gains but has a much greater scope for overclocking!

I think that intel should have dropped the Ivy-e series, it's going to be effectively obsolete as soon as it's launched as far as consumers are concerned. The Haswell chips are going to end up faster even taking corecount, Cache volume & memory channels into account.
The only reason for and market the Ivy-e chips will make any difference in, is the corporate sector where lower power consumption and more computational power will make a difference. Xeon's don't get overclocked.

Intel would be better off launching an unlocked haswell with all-of/some-of More Cores, Higher Cache Volume, More Memory Channels, Higher DIMM count - say 2 or 4 dimms per channel rather than the 1 or 2 currently, more pci-e lanes for multi-sli/x-fire without relying on additional chipsets.

I've got an old i7 920 running quite happily at 3.8GHz currently, the only reason I'll upgrade it is a) it fails (watercooled and stock voltage so unlikely, possible but unlikely) b) programs and games become cpu bottlenecked (even more unlikely as games have to be able to run on hardware that while newer, is still weaker than the ol' 920) c) new chip is able to provide a better than 50% improvement in performance (including moderate overclock) compared to the ol' 920 d)new chip is able to provide a better than 25% improvement in performance (including moderate overclock) and still have a better than 50% reduction in operating cost.

As such I doubt I'll be replacing it until Skylake in 2015 when DDR4 support will be mainstream. I reckon another 2 years outta the 920 is possible without suffering from bottlenecking.

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Originally Posted by ionicle

have home processors reached their pinacle until software catches up?...i wonder

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I don't want software to 'catch up'. It's already horrendously inefficient as it is. I like being able to run multiple VMs and applications on my desktop without everything grinding to a halt.

how about vs a i7 920 at 4ghz?

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Originally Posted by ionicle

have home processors reached their pinacle until software catches up?...i wonder

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I've not yet found a compelling upgrade from my old i7-920. Maybe another generation or two and it'll finally be time to upgrade!