News - Intel details entire Ivy Bridge line up

[HEXUS]

17 new desktop chips across the Core i7 and Core i5 product lines.

Read more.

[brasco]

Definitely worth a look. Can't wait to see them bench Although where are the 8cores? Are they later on in the year?

cheers
brasc

[Whiternoise]

What's the TDP for a, say, Q6600 equivalent these days?

Sometimes I wonder if the extra processing oomph is that necessary. I run a 6600 at the moment, and I'd much rather trade off the speed for power efficiency (anything that needs more processor gets dumped on a grid, as a scientist). I'm not sure how much it'd save in terms of cash, but you'd need less cooling power for a start.

The only thing that takes a lot of power is transcoding video, but that should be leaning towards GPU acceleration these days, I think.

[Terbinator]

What's the TDP for a, say, Q6600 equivalent these days?

Sometimes I wonder if the extra processing oomph is that necessary. I run a 6600 at the moment, and I'd much rather trade off the speed for power efficiency (anything that needs more processor gets dumped on a grid, as a scientist). I'm not sure how much it'd save in terms of cash, but you'd need less cooling power for a start.

Around 55-65W i guess, going off a Core i3 21xx which will trounce a Q6600 in anything thats lightly threaded and possibly still best it in heavily threaded stuff.

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I have a Core i3 2100 and a Q6600. A mildly overclocked Q6600 running at 3GHZ was faster than my Core i3 2100 running at 3.1GHZ in HandBrake 0.9.5 although in games the Core i3 2100 is much faster it seems.

[aidanjt]

I have a Core i3 2100 and a Q6600. A mildly overclocked Q6600 running at 3GHZ was faster than my Core i3 2100 running at 3.1GHZ in HandBrake 0.9.5 although in games the Core i3 2100 is much faster it seems.

I bet your i3 is a whole heap easier on the juice.

[Hoonigan]

Around 55-65W i guess, going off a Core i3 21xx which will trounce a Q6600 in anything thats lightly threaded and possibly still best it in heavily threaded stuff.

Is a Q6600 really that bad these days? Core i3s are dual-core, aren't they?

[Terbinator]

Is a Q6600 really that bad these days? Core i3s are dual-core, aren't they?

But hyper-threaded, higher clocked and have better IPC than a Q6600.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/53?vs=289

[Hoonigan]

But hyper-threaded, higher clocked and have better IPC than a Q6600.

http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/53?vs=289

It seems that the Q6600 is still a very good processor considering it's about 5 years old.

I still maintain it's the best processor that's been available in my "PC buying lifetime" (around the last 10 years)

[Terbinator]

Definitely agree.

[lkarunan]

I know Z77 details haven't been announced but would it be an automatic choice over Z68 for someone who doesn't have SB and is planning on a new IB build? If IB processors are expected to be priced the same as SB does the same logic hold for Z77 & Z68 or do we have to wait form more info to be announced before budgeting?

[edvinasm]

Q6600 was no slouch and not the cheapest CPU on the market. Hardly we should compare Q6600 with i3, especially given different sockets. Those who have Q6600 and are gaming should upgrade. Those who are rendering and time is crucial should've upgraded a year ago. For general use Q6600 is very competitive IMO, especially if you already own one.
I am waiting for Ivy but not because it's super fast because it won't be. It's because am due an upgrade and I like the 2500k price. Z77 + Core i5-3570K is worth the wait IMO.

[Hoonigan]

Q6600 was no slouch and not the cheapest CPU on the market.

No, it wasn't the cheapest, but until about a year ago, I could've sold it and possibly got all of my money back on it. I paid £144 for it a month or two after launch and they were still going for around £120 on eBay for a good one.

I was especially pleased with mine because I managed to get 4GHz out of it, it wasn't 100% stable but it got there. It sat happily at 3.6GHz for about 2 years.

[Whiternoise]

Q6600 was no slouch and not the cheapest CPU on the market. Hardly we should compare Q6600 with i3, especially given different sockets. Those who have Q6600 and are gaming should upgrade. Those who are rendering and time is crucial should've upgraded a year ago. For general use Q6600 is very competitive IMO, especially if you already own one.
I am waiting for Ivy but not because it's super fast because it won't be. It's because am due an upgrade and I like the 2500k price. Z77 + Core i5-3570K is worth the wait IMO.

I'm not so concerned about price, more how much less power will a comparable chip use today - the process is now a third of what it was since the chip was out. The 6600 is rated at around 100W, Ivy Bridge has a maximum TDP of 77W if the stories are to be believed in addition to it being adjustable depending on the situation. That's staggering, quite frankly. Not unexpected, but very impressive.

Most gamers don't need fast CPUs, my graphics card does the vast majority of the oomph as it always has. More important is the number of cores these days and once you hit 4, you're easy. The speed isn't that important either, once you're over a couple of GHz, unless you're playing something as poorly optimised as GTA:IV.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/...k,2738-16.html

My next graphics update will probably a passive card - thinking about the passive 6850.

http://www.ebuyer.com/272570-powerco...50-1gbd5-s3dhg

It's 30W less, does the same job and is silent. What more do you want!

Given the choice between a new £200 CPU and the latest £200 graphics card, I'll always take the graphics card. The only thing that ever 100%'s my quad is video encoding, BOINC or Mathematica. Case in point, the chip I had before was an E2160 - the lowest of the low (but overclocks like nobody's business) and I didn't have any trouble playing games.

What else do I do? Browse the internet, code, watch movies and listen to music. None of those are very CPU intensive. The code I write is mostly server-side so doesn't need to be compiled and the stuff that is compiled isn't large enough to be a problem (GCC isn't multithreaded anyway afaik). I've got 8GB ram because it's cheap and again, only Mathematica has ever used more than 6GB at once. If I was into rendering, I'd use a proper workstation card like a TESLA rather than farm it out to a processor.

Hence why I wonder whether it's really necessary to shell out on the expensive chips when the low end is more than good enough. I'd much rather plough my money into SSDs (hard drive latency is much more of an issue than CPU speed nowadays). What's becoming more important to me is efficiency and noise. The 4870 sounds like a train...

[CAT-THE-FIFTH]

I got a Core i3 2100 because it was relatively cheap,had a low TDP and did the job for my SFF PC. If I need extra performance in the future I can always become a secondhand Core i5,Core i7 or Xeon E3 at some point.

BTW,the Xeon E3-1230 is basically a Core i7 with the IGP deactivated and a lower 80W TDP.

[Jimbo75]

The Q6600 may only have been rated 100W but it's power draw was pretty horrendous. Don't get me wrong - I had one for 2 years and it was probably the best cpu I had too (I sold it for a small loss a year ago).

If you compare it to the 980 BE it gets slapped silly - http://www.anandtech.com/bench/Product/53?vs=362

Great cpu yes, but it's pretty comparable to say a comparison of the i7 2600K vs the 980 BE now. That shouldn't be a huge surprise considering that the Q6600 was 65nm vs 45nm 980 BE, and the 980 BE is 45nm vs the 32nm 2600K. It probably will surprise a lot of people who actually believe intel has some god-given superiority that isn't down to their process lead.