More Details on Ivy Bridge Models "S" and "T" Emerge

I will take a 3570S please.

at the risk of sounding totally noob on this website, an inquiring mind wants to know: What happened to the GHz race? i thought we would be at 5GHz already . please no flaming, i sincerely want to know.

Looks like there's not much reason to upgrade from Sandy Bridge unless you really want that energy savings.

I think there's gonna be a lot of headroom for overclocking on Ivy Bridge, next year is going to be awesome.

Looks like they downclocked from SB...strange. I thought they could keep the same thermal and power savings draw but can raise the frequency higher due to moving to tri-gate 22nm.

Long story short, power consumption and heat. The high clock speed Pentium 4s started drawing about 125W once they got to the 3.8Ghz range, and for reasons of power consumption and heat that just wasn't economical. It seems like 125W is about the ceiling for most processors, past that point is gets very difficult to go much higher economically.

The GHz race was the rage when performance scaled with frequency so the point was going up-up and of course going up meant power hungry and hot processors. But at a distinct point in time, a light bulb lit in one engineers head and he thought "what if performance can scale upwards with improvements in architecture rather than just plain speed". So back to the drawing board and there u have it, speed obtained through "cleverness" rather then "brute force".

AMD lost it, so Intel stopped competing. the 3770K would probably have been introduced at 3.9GHz base and 4.5GHz turbo, and probably would have hit the market already, if Zambezi would have been at least competitive. Intel now has no reason to push their chips to go faster. Nobody else is going to come along and sell something cheaper and faster, so why bother? they'll sap us for as much money as they possibly can until someone comes out with something that would compete again.

Looks to me like this Ivy Bridge will greatly help sales of notebooks with the lower TDP and increased graphics power!

The GHz race died some 6-7 years ago when AMD figured out that they could kick intel's ass in optimizing design rather than raw speed. Then intel took that cue and came out with the Core solo/duo and Core 2 duo/quad and AMD has been playing catchup ever sense. Also they found that there are issues with power constraints and stability going past 5GHz, as the power requirement started turning exponential, and then running that much power causes damage to the processor so things start dying quickly.

But ya, there was a time when the P4s were coming out that they thought they could push the micro-burst architecture to some 15GHz before they would have to change their processor design... obviously this did not work out.

hummm no 6 core 12 thread or 8 core/ 16 thread cpu's.... fail/skip/bypass

@dgingeri

er no, it's an exponential thing, given the current material technology, as you approach 5GHz the internal friction starts to take over and the thing starts to exponentially heat up, to go beyond 5GHz without the aid of exotic cooling requires the utilization of different semi-conductor material

Seeing as these are aimed at the mainstream desktop market, that's not surprising. More disappointing is that they weren't able to (or simply chose not to) push the clock speeds higher. Not much to interest anyone over Sandy Bridge unless you want/need the lower TDPs.

The notebook/ultrabook variants will be interesting, though.

Kinda meet half wayish. I little bit of a downclock but a solid reduction in TDP. The 2500k TDP is 95W while the equivalent 3570S is 65W and only 100Mhz slower. I don't think I'll upgrade though since I'm not running at the full 95W 24/7 and the money lost in selling the 2500k probably wouldn't exceed the money gained in energy consumption.

Hmm, only the top two models have HD4000 graphics, which was the graphics silicon that we saw 3dmark vantage benchmarks charts a day or two ago on tomshardware with Sandy Bridge HD2000 vs Ivy HD4000. All the rest are HD2500 graphics. I wonder what laptop chips will have HD4000 graphics?

I along with a lot of you are also disappointed in the lack of new enthusiast chips that push the envelope. It'll be interesting to see if the overclocking steps are the same as SBridge and if Throttlestop can help.
Maybe Intel is getting lazy.

Those benchmarks were HD3000 vs HD4000, not HD2000.

Are these desktop or notebook processors???

good upgrade from an S939 opteron 185 definitly

45w @ 2.5ghz, 3.7ghz turbo, 8MB Cache, and HT?!

Wow Intel, just... wow.

I know some guys have already responded, but this is how I explain it, maybe someone might find this useful.

It GHz race was like having a brick layer who could lay, say, 10 bricks per minute. We tried to get more done by having him work faster, but he started getting really hot and it was hard work.

Then, they (manufacturers) brought in another guy that could do 50%-75% of the one guy and now both of them lay 7 bricks per minute at a reasonable pace. They use less energy b/c they don't have to work as fast (diminishing returns as you go faster), and you still get an extra 4 bricks per minute.

Same thing with going to quad core.

My guess is that this was intentional and that the second gen Ivy's will push clock speeds with the tri-gate; the reason being that you want to make sure that everything works with a new technology line first. I image that with a 3.9GHz turbo core, you can o/c them really well. My Athlon II x3 is at 3.7

This is an overclocking dream come true. 4 cores + HT at 3.1 GHz, all for 65 watts TDP? Sounds a lot like an easy 5 GHz on air to me.

Interesting how only the i7s and the Ts are hyperthreaded. Nice to see the i5 get 4 cores though.

Damn- I was really looking forward to upgrading to a 6 core cpu... Hopefully they reconsider and do come out with one!

The spies at AMD have to get their hands on the 3D transistor... 4 cores is for tablets

So as a gamer, which do I want, the T or the S? Also, Toms keeps saying the current 2500k is the best CPU for gaming. Now with this chart out, what is a similar processor in terms of performance?

I'm also scratching my head. These clock speeds are lower than Sandy Bridge's, I think. (I believe, 2500k=3.3 GHz, 2600k=3.4 GHz and 2700k=3.5 GHz) How are these better and showing better numbers? Someone enlighten me.

These are the energy-efficient models, and the power savings over the base model have to come from somewhere. They're still going to release models that are basically SB with the new transistors and such; see the link in the first line of the article.

You want neither; these are the energy-efficient models. See the link in the first sentence of the article for a listing of the normal versions.

i'm disappointed. no 6c/8c? low cpu speed? i'll pass. maybe i'll pick of amd's piledriver cpu instead.

The reason being power usage increases exponentially as voltage increases, and sadly you need very high voltages to have very high frequencies. In addition to that, high voltages significantly cuts down on your chips' longevity. That and thermal cycling.