Report: Specifications of Ivy Bridge-E CPUs
Some information has come to light about Intel's upcoming Ivy Bridge-E CPUs.
While we're expecting the Haswell chips to launch soon, we haven't seen Ivy Bridge-E chips hit the market yet (the current Core i7 Extreme chips on the market are based on the Sandy Bridge architecture). Before we see Haswell launch though, we are expecting the high-end Ivy Bridge-E chips to round out the generation sometime in the second half of 2013.
X-bit Labs has made a table that gives us a good overview of Intel's plans for the -E lineup of products. Looking at the numbers, we can see a clear difference between the chips. While the cache and TDP are quite similar, the clock frequencies have taken a little jump, as well as the memory controller, which jumped from supporting 1600 MHz memory to 1866 MHz memory. The performance jump appears to be minimal, and unsurprisingly so. Ivy Bridge didn't improve much on performance over Sandy Bridge. Note, though, that the specifications listed are still unofficial. What we do know is that buyers will be able to drop the chips right into existing LGA2011 motherboards.
Based on the numbers given we see the successor to the i7-3820K as the i7-4820K, the i7-3930K is succeeded by the i7-4930K. Similarly, the i7-3960K is bettered by the i7-4960K. What we don't see is a successor to the i7-3970X; however, we could assume that down the line Intel might introduce an i7-4970X to top everything off. This is not shown on Intel's roadmap below, though.


Aren't we all /cry
Aren't we all /cry
Remember the claims that Ivybridge-E would have between 8-15 cores? Lies.
"Sir, AMD has no serious products to put heat on us, at least for a year or two."
"Okay. Let's strangle ARM!"
When there's a sudden downpour of games ported from the PS4 that natively support octo-cores.
Even when PS4 ports come to PC, desktop quads run at ~2.1X the PS4's CPU clock rate and should easily make up for the lack of octo cores. Ports will likely get optimized for that by folding some threaded bits back into their main threads to avoid unnecessary threading overhead for trivial code.
But that's too much work. If many ported games still only went up to DX9, what makes you think they'll put in extra effort to "fold" back in the threads?
Also, folding threads into one giant one? You should play Cities XL sometime. It's a single-threaded game first released in 2010 and so far received a 2011, 2012, and 2013 DLC, but that doesn't mean it won't try to process a metropolis's hundreds of thousands of commuters.
God that game is horrific even on an i5... A friend of mine had to disable three of his i5 2500k's cores and clocked the heck out of the one core to delay the inevitable bog-down of the traffic simulator.
From what I've heard Ivy Bridge-E has 12-cores and 30MB L3, it's just a question of how many cores are fused off in the i7 versions.
Those rumored specs seem a little suspicious to me, but if they do turn out to be true then it's going to be pretty disappointing having half the cores on die disabled. I was kind of expecting Intel to increase the active core count to ~8 while maintaining similar clocks and TDP, or something along those lines.
They should make something actually extreme and brand THAT as X series CPU. Unlocked multiplier, 8 cores, default clock at 4 GHz... etc etc.. Seriously 6 core means extreme?? LoL..
when intel feels like making a 160W cpu.