Is the LGA 2011 future-proof? (4820k vs 4770k)

One of the common findings among all of the various Haswell reviews is that the 6 core Sandybridge-E microprocessors still trounced the brand new Haswell microprocessors in applications that exploit only the core x86 instruction set (which is most applications). Anyone who purchased a Sandybridge-E microprocessor two years ago when they were released is still a very happy camper today; they've proven to have incredible market staying power. This is reinforced by the fact that the 3930k is still selling for almost $600 on most online retailers two years after its debut at that same price. This is almost twice the price of AMD's rocket powered FX-9590 which slipped from $1000 to $350 in a matter of weeks.

Applications that take advantage of new instructions found in Haswell performed somewhat better, but most consumer applications do not use them. Ivybridge-E microprocessors were released about a month or so ago and offered the same improvement over Sandybridge-E as Ivybridge offered over Sandybridge, between 5% and 10% across the board at comparable clock speeds.

Haswell-E is on the horizon about a year from now and is expected to feature support for DDR4. There's no word yet as to whether or not it will require a new socket, but if Intel retains the onboard VRM or adds DDR4 support a new socket is almost guaranteed.

The benefits are derived almost exclusively from the fact that the LGA 1156/1155/1150 platforms feature no more than 4 physical cores per microprocessor package. The LGA 2011 platform features up to 15 cores per package in the server space, and up to 6 on consumer desktops at the same operating speed.

I will caution you though, the 3820 and 4820 aren't all that great. Despite featuring the same 40 PCIe lanes and 4 memory channels, they have only 4 ISA cores and do not exhibit the same gains across the board as their 6 core counterparts. If you want to go the LGA-2011 route, it's best to spend the money on a 4930K and decent high quality LGA2011 motherboard. Furthermore, complexity of the LGA2011 platform means that most of the motherboards have been found to have shortcomings, some of them serious. The best contenders are those from Asus but be prepared to pay the associated price premium not only on the CPU itself but on the motherboard as well.

If you are going to be using applications that will leverage the more cores introduced on the 2011 platform I would get either a 3930k or 4930k but not the 3820 or 4820. And I would not see going with an AMD CPU as an option because if you are serious about this computer the weaker AMD cores will not hold up to the hyperthreaded cores on the Intel side for what you are doing.