14 DAY TRIAL // That Intel was going to deliver a number of new high-end central processing units sometime during late fall or early winter has been known for some time, but only now have their prices been discovered.
As always, even if Intel is not taking any official steps to have its processing products revealed in advance, information reached the web regardless.
Then again, with how avidly it is always working in its labs, and the curiosity of market watchers, it would be strange if leaks did not drip over to the Internet.
One recent such happening was the discovery of the exact capabilities of those so-called upgradeable Intel Core CPUs.
Now, an even more recent report has appeared, one that is focused on a different set of central processing units, the Sandy Bridge-E.
Essentially, they are the upcoming range of high-end models, with four or six cores each and paired with the X79 chipset. This means that their socket is LGA 2011, the one which will act as a replacement for the 1366/X58.
Ultimately, performance is what will determine the appeal of these chips, what with their prices not being all that flattering, compared to what they will take the place of.
The Core i7-3820, as the least mighty of the trio, boasts a base clock of 3.6 GHz (it is a quad-core with 10 MB of L3 cache) and a Turbo frequency of 3.9 GHz. Its price is $294.
The second unit, priced at $583 and dubbed Core i7-3930K, is a six-core model with 12 threads (the one above had 8 threads), 12 MB of L3 cache and has base and Turbo clocks of 3.2 GHz and 3.8 GHz, respectively.
Finally, the Core i7-3960X, as the strongest of them, will sell for $999 when shipments start in the fourth quarter of this year (2011). For that price, users will get 6 cores, 12 threads, 15 MB of cache and speeds of 3.3 GHz and 3.9 GHz.
All of them are designed with a TDP (thermal design power) of 130 W.