Sandy Bridge E processors out today...

[Brandon J.F.]

Who's buying? I'm really tempted to pick up the i7-3960X.

The Intel X79 platform for socket LGA2011 processors proved that it is clearly the new enthusiast desktop platform for Intel. The Intel Core i7-3960X processor did a great job of showing just how far ahead Intel is when it comes to processor performance. AMD's new 'Bulldozer' processor series doesn't stand a chance against Intel's new 'Sandy Bridge-E' processors. The Intel Core i7-3960X is hands down the fastest processor that we have ever tested and used before. It is without a doubt the exotic super car of processors and with its commanding $990 suggested retail price it reserved for the select few that are willing to pay to have the best money can buy.

The Intel Core i7-3960X was remarkably fast on multi-threaded benchmarks and that is very good news for power users that really tax their systems with workloads like video encoding and decoding.

Benchmark Results: The x264 HD benchmark is very CPU intensive and it showed the Intel Core i7-3960X Sandy Bridge-E processor running at 194.4 FPS on the first pass and 61.2 FPS on the second pass. The Intel Core i7-3960X really eats this benchmark up and if you do a ton of video editing this is clearly the processor architecture that you need!

http://www.legitreviews.com/article/1773/1/

And I'm thinking about pairing it with this:

MSI N580GTX Lightning Xtreme Edition GeForce GTX 580 (Fermi) 3072MB 384-bit GDDR5 PCI Express 2.0 x16 HDCP Ready SLI Support Video Card

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16814127589

And this:

G.SKILL Ripjaws X Series 32GB (4 x 8GB) 240-Pin DDR3 SDRAM DDR3 1600 (PC3 12800) Desktop Memory Model F3-12800CL10Q-32GBXL

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16820231490

 

[Mark George]

I will almost definitely pull the trigger in the next few days. Anandtech has a mostly positive review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5091/...dy-bridge-e-review-keeping-the-high-end-alive. I'm working on a first-gen i7 overclocked to 3.3 GHz. It's still pretty awesome, but I want MORE awesome!

 

[Brandon J.F.]

I will almost definitely pull the trigger in the next few days. Anandtech has a mostly positive review: http://www.anandtech.com/show/5091/...dy-bridge-e-review-keeping-the-high-end-alive. I'm working on a first-gen i7 overclocked to 3.3 GHz. It's still pretty awesome, but I want MORE awesome!

Yeah, the reviews are quite good. It will overclock to at least 4.625GHz also. I can't wait to hear how this handles R3Ds! I'm in the market for "MORE awesome" as well

 

[Bruce Allen]

These should be great - but I was more interested in these (or their Xeon equivalents) when they were supposed to launch in July or so.

Now, I'm probably going to stick it out with my Sandy Bridge 4-core iMac... wait till next year to compare:
- 8 or 6-core Sandy Bridge Xeon (possibly two of them)
- overclocked 6-core Sandy Bridge
- overclocked 4-core Ivy Bridge

Along with:
- next-gen nVidia and AMD gfx cards

I quite likely might end up with just an Ivy Bridge 4-core... with two or three very fast graphics cards and very fast storage. Also need to decide between Mac and PC (and PC will hopefully have Thunderbolt by that point?).

2012 should be fun!

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Brandon J.F.]

All good points Bruce. This is a tough call. I really want Thunderbolt support, but I don't want to wait til March or April (or later?) to get it. Any idea when the Sandy Bridge E Xeons are due out? They are going to be 8 cores. I am leaning towards jumping on this new chip and then upgrading to Ivy Bridge E late 2012 or early 2013. From what I've read, the Ivy Bridge E chips are likely going to be swappable with the Sandy Bridge E chips so upgrading will mean just buying the new chip. Granted that won't help me with Thunderbolt support, but still...

 

[Roberto Lequeux]

With 8 slot motherboards you can go with 4GB sticks and save, still end up with 32GB. Or double that if you felt the need.

http://www.newegg.com/Product/Product.aspx?Item=N82E16813131801

 

[Bruce Allen]

All good points Bruce. This is a tough call. I really want Thunderbolt support, but I don't want to wait til March or April (or later?) to get it. Any idea when the Sandy Bridge E Xeons are due out? They are going to be 8 cores. I am leaning towards jumping on this new chip and then upgrading to Ivy Bridge E late 2012 or early 2013. From what I've read, the Ivy Bridge E chips are likely going to be swappable with the Sandy Bridge E chips so upgrading will mean just buying the new chip. Granted that won't help me with Thunderbolt support, but still...

Sounds like a good plan, Brandon!

Sandy Bridge Xeons should follow very soon but price/performance is never particularly good. Be interesting to see how well the 8-core ones perform but I'm guessing they're clocked a lot lower? Overclocked 6-core should rock.

Main reason I want Thunderbolt is I anticipate going from laptop to desktop a lot near the end of 2012 - and being able to unplug a fast GPU and Blackmagic video card from my desktop and take it with me for on-set DaVinci appeals to my penny-pinching sensibilities

That said, just having good old PCIe cards is still a great method and once you start counting the costs of Thunderbolt cables etc this is more cost-effective than it appears!

And Sandy Bridge E -> Ivy Bridge E sounds smart, yes! Very interested to see if Ivy Bridge E / Xeon schedule is similarly delayed or if it'll come out in 2012?

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[Tom Lowe]

Is there an 8-core version of this CPU coming out? I am not asking about Xenon.

 

[Brandon J.F.]

Is there an 8-core version of this CPU coming out? I am not asking about Xenon.

From what I've read the Xeon will be the only 8-core version.

 

[David Rasberry]

6 cores for $600 seems like a real good deal for the lower priced version. Build a pretty decent system for between $2k and $3k.

 

[PatrickW]

Is there an 8-core version of this CPU coming out? I am not asking about Xenon.

There are no 8-Core Sandy Bridge E processors on the Intel roadmap.

First 8 cores I see coming out will be Xeon E5 in Q1 2012.

 

[Bruce Allen]

Okay, I gotz me purchasez worked out:

Today: use quad-3.4 iMac for finish off all current personal projects, use tablet laptop for storyboarding and scriptwriting of next short film
Summer 2012: buy Ivy Bridge laptop and hide out in South Africa, doing previz and writing music for next short film
Winter 2012 or Spring 2013: take Ivy Bridge laptop on set with me for shoot (hopefully with Dragon-enabled Epics and buy ultra powerful Ivy Bridge E / Ivy Bridge Xeon desktop with a stack of great GPUs to do the stereo 4K 48fps finish at home

But yes, I'm going to be mega-jealous of you Sandy Bridge E guys until then...

Bruce Allen
www.boacinema.com

 

[DJ Meyer]

Bought a 3930x. The 3960x 's 3 more MB of cache not worth double the price.

 

[Brandon J.F.]

Bought a 3930x. The 3960x 's 3 more MB of cache not worth double the price.

That may be the smart move. I had to dig a little, but I found a review that compares benchmarks for both processors:

This overclock provided a substantial boost in performance in every test, allowing the i7-3930K to extend its lead over every other CPU bar the i7-3960X Extreme Edition. This is because the latter has 15MB, as opposed to 12MB, of Level 3 cache. However, when both Sandy Bridge E processors were overclocked, there wasn't much difference in performance. In our Media Benchmarks, for example, the i7-3930K was less than 0.2 per cent slower than the i7-3960X.

We started off this review pondering what the 'E' in Sandy Bridge E stood for and we're now fairly convinced that it doesn't stand for 'Extreme' or 'Enthusiast'. Instead, it must mean 'Enterprise' because most professional-level applications are able to address the 12 execution units of Sandy Bridge E processors. In Cinebench R11.5, for example, the i7-3930K was a magnificent 36 per cent faster than the quad-core, Hyper-Threaded i7-2600K.

The i7-3930K is so fast when overclocked, it also provides a serious alternative choice to a dual-processor workstation. Using Cinebench R11.5 as an example again, the overclocked i7-3930K was less than 1 per cent slower than a pair of Xeon X5650s, a combination that would set you back at least £1,100 more. However, you'll need powerful cooling to tame the heat of the CPU and its VRMs - water-cooling would be our choice for both.

Ultimately, while we're disappointed by the performance and limited overclockability of both Sandy Bridge E processors, its clear that the i7-3930K is by far the superior of the two. At stock speeds it's not that much slower than the far more expensive i7-3960X, and when overclocked the two chips performance is indistinguishable.

http://www.bit-tech.net/hardware/cpus/2011/11/14/intel-sandy-bridge-e-review/12

The general consensus on these processors seems to be they aren't really worth it for most users including gamers, but for workstation use they are a big improvement.

 

[Brandon J.F.]

Here is a great comparison:

http://coolaler.com/showthread.php?t=276465

The two chips are damn near identical in most every test when overclocked.

 

[Zack Birlew]

I'd really like to see how the 8-core Xeons turn out. I'm still rocking a 2007 dual 3ghz Mac Pro and wouldn't mind an upgrade like that, especially since a Mac Mini can put my setup to shame. However, I think the real advancements will be with GPU rendering, so we may see more of a boost from next gen videocards than processors.

 

[Brandon J.F.]

http://www.xbitlabs.com/articles/cpu/display/core-i7-3960x-3930k_10.html

No overclocking for these benchmarks...

 

[Brandon J.F.]

I'd really like to see how the 8-core Xeons turn out. I'm still rocking a 2007 dual 3ghz Mac Pro and wouldn't mind an upgrade like that, especially since a Mac Mini can put my setup to shame. However, I think the real advancements will be with GPU rendering, so we may see more of a boost from next gen videocards than processors.

Is the GPU used for debayering r3d footage? It's my understanding it's not, but I could be wrong.

 

[Subhadip Sen]

I am more excited about the other launch yesterday, Opteron 6200 series. AMD are giving 16 workstation cores (8 modules, technically) for the same price as Intel's 6 desktop cores. My money is on the Opteron 6282 SE (16C @ 2.6 GHz) outperforming the 3960X (6C @ 3.3 GHz) in multi-threaded apps (i.e. CS5, X264, etc) by a bit (both cost $1000) and cleaning house with similarly priced Xeons. Cray has snapped up these Opterons for all their 2011/12 supercomputers over Xeons for a good reason - performance/price. It also reserves the trump card of FMA and XOP instructions which might accelerate future media/video-related software (the already do accelerate the beta build of X264). Still, worth waiting for some relevant benchmarks - quite a few software behave rather strangely with the brand new Bulldozer architecture, which is really a lot different from any other CPU. The Windows 8 scheduler and updated Linux kernels will bring about notable benefits across the board too.

The cheapest 16C Opteron costs only $520. That's a 32C system with a CPU cost of only $1050! Better yet, a 4P 64 core system for $2100. Not sure how well apps relevant to post-production will scale to 64 threads though.

 

[Brandon J.F.]

Subhadip, if you come across any benchmarks for these chips please share them here. Sounds really interesting.