Haswell has been out in the wild for 3 months now, while Sandy Bridge-E has remained Intel's "ultimate" desktop platform for most two years. Withal equally nosotros had anticipated, Intel is now set for a refresh of its Extreme platform, simply they won't exist skipping the Ivy Bridge compages and moving straight to Haswell. Rather, the LGA2011 platform is getting an upgrade with new Ivy Span-Due east processors.

Enter the Cadre i7-4960X which still features half dozen cores, 12 threads, 15MB L3 cache, quad-channel DDR3 retention and is supported by the same aging X79 chipset. This doesn't sound very exciting, and then what's new?

Well, other than a slight bump in frequency, which is kind of pointless on an unlocked Extreme Edition processor, and the ability to natively back up DDR3-1866 memory, not a lot. You do go the slight efficiency improvements of the Ivy Bridge architecture, and honestly Haswell didn't practice much for the desktop anyway, so that'southward not something we'd criticize kickoff thing.

But before spoiling everything that's relevant nigh the new Core i7-4960X and get on benchmarking Ivy Bridge-East confronting other Intel loftier-end offerings, let usa rewind a fleck on the history of the LGA2011 platform.

Intel first introduced LGA2011 dorsum in November of 2022 with two processors and i chipset -- the Core i7-3960X and i7-3930K running on the X79 chipset. Based on the Sandy Bridge compages, which had been released 11 months prior, "Sandy Bridge-Due east" (32 nm) was born.

Boasting up to 6 cores, 12 threads, 15MB of L3 cache and a quad-aqueduct memory controller, the new Sandy Span-E processors were monsters.

The flagship and Extreme Edition model, known every bit the Core i7-3960X, cost a cool $k and although it was slower than the $320 Core i7-2600K when comparing retentiveness bandwidth and gaming functioning, it was worlds faster in our constructed, awarding and encoding benchmarks.

Just v months later on the release of Sandy Bridge-E we saw the arrival of Ivy Span Core i7 processors. Ivy Span adopted the same LGA1155 socket used past the standard Sandy Bridge processor. At the captain was the Core i7-3770K.

When compared to the previous i7-2600K flagship, the i7-3770K was ~x% faster while consuming ~10% less power. A noteworthy improvement, but nothing to become overly excited about, and certainly non plenty to warrant upgrading if you already had a Sandy Bridge processor even though Ivy was a driblet-in replacement.

Then this past June the latest Haswell architecture was released and along with information technology the Core i7-4770K desktop part. Interestingly (or should we say, unfortunately) Haswell introduced a new socket (LGA1150) which removed five pins and is not compatible with LGA1155 processors. Our testing showed an boilerplate performance gain over Ivy Bridge at a trivial under 10%, while Haswell actually consumed more power.

So, dorsum to our initial question: what's new with Ivy Bridge-Eastward?