14 DAY TRIAL // After a few days ago the detailed specifications of Intel's upcoming Sandy Bridge-E processors made their way to the Web, it's now time to take a look at some leaked slides that detail Intel's performance estimates for its upcoming high-end enthusiasts processors.
The slides compare Intel's current flagship consumer CPU, the Core i7-990X, with the company's fastest desktop processor based on the Sandy Bridge-E architecture, the Core i7-3960X.
As many of you know by now, both of these CPUs include six computing cores with Hyper-Threading support and have a TDP of 130W.
However, this is where the similarities end, as the two chips come clocked at different base and Turbo Boost frequencies (3.46GHz base and 3.73GHz Turbo for the 990X vs. 3.30GHz base and 3.90GHz Turbo for the 3960X), while also sporting different feature sets and L3 cache size.
Both of these latter specs favor the Core i7-3960X since this packs 15MB of Level 3 cache memory as well as support for the new AVX instructions set and a quad-channel memory controller.
Just as Intel points out in its slides, all of these improvements can bring quite a noticeable performance in applications that are memory bond or if AVX instructions are being used.
In the real world, however, the performance gains aren't as impressive as those observed in synthetic benchmarks and these seem to hover between 12 and 15 percent, the only area where the 3960X can detach itself being “3D Gaming.”
However, it’s important to note that this result is estimated by Intel and that it only takes into consideration the Physics score returned by 3DMark 11, which can hardly be used to reflect a CPU's gaming performance.
Finally, I guess that it still remains to be seen how Sandy Bridge-E will actually perform against Intel's current six-core processors when a more extensive set of benchmarks is being used, but for now it seems like the next-generation Core i7 chips won't actually bring the huge performance increase everybody expected, especially considering that we are taking about $1000 US parts. (via Donanim Haber)
