Results: Synthetics
Using the same GeForce GTX Titan as our Haswell launch coverage, we see that Ivy Bridge-E doesn’t do anything for single-card graphics performance in 3DMark 11 (which is what we’d expect, given that both platforms yield a full 16 lanes at 8 GT/s).
In contrast, the processor-bound Physics module demonstrates a small bump in favor of the Core i7-4960X over -3970X. More pronounced is the -4960X’s 30%+ improvement over Core i7-4770K.
There’s very little gain over the Sandy Bridge-E flagship in SiSoftware’s Sandra Arithmetic sub-test.
The same goes for the Multimedia benchmark. In fact, Core i7-4770K yields better numbers in the integer component thanks to its AVX 2 support.
It’s possible that we could get more memory bandwidth from Core i7-4960X using a quad-channel DDR3-1866 memory kit. However, we only had access to 1600 MT/s for this story, so we used the same G.Skill kit from our Core i7-4770K launch piece. We already know this platform isn’t particularly bandwidth-constrained on the desktop, though, so we don’t expect any real-world benefit beyond this 41 GB/s mark.
When we sort by L1 cache throughput, the Haswell architecture’s doubled theoretical max yields almost 1 TB/s, while Ivy Bridge-E ducks in under 800 GB/s. On paper, Haswell should also push twice as much L2 bandwidth as well. We haven’t observed this yet, though. In contrast, Core i7-4960X, sporting six cores with 256 KB of L2 each, pushes more aggregate bandwidth, nearly hitting 500 GB/s. The extra cores also help with shared L3 bandwidth, given more stops along the ring bus.
