Intel Core i7 3960X (Sandy Bridge E) Review: Keeping the High End Alive
by Anand Lal Shimpi on November 14, 2011 3:01 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core i7
- Sandy Bridge
- Sandy Bridge E
The Test
To keep the review length manageable we're presenting a subset of our results here. For all benchmark results and even more comparisons be sure to use our performance comparison tool: Bench.
| Motherboard: |
ASUS P8Z68-V Pro (Intel Z68) ASUS Crosshair V Formula (AMD 990FX) Intel DX79SI (Intel X79) |
| Hard Disk: |
Intel X25-M SSD (80GB) Crucial RealSSD C300 |
| Memory: | 4 x 4GB G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3-1600 9-9-9-20 |
| Video Card: | ATI Radeon HD 5870 (Windows 7) |
| Video Drivers: | AMD Catalyst 11.10 Beta (Windows 7) |
| Desktop Resolution: | 1920 x 1200 |
| OS: | Windows 7 x64 |
Cache and Memory Bandwidth Performance
The biggest changes from the original Sandy Bridge are the increased L3 cache size and the quad-channel memory interface. We'll first look at the impact a 15MB L3 has on latency:
| Cache/Memory Latency Comparison | ||||||
| L1 | L2 | L3 | Main Memory | |||
| AMD FX-8150 (3.6GHz) | 4 | 21 | 65 | 195 | ||
| AMD Phenom II X4 975 BE (3.6GHz) | 3 | 15 | 59 | 182 | ||
| AMD Phenom II X6 1100T (3.3GHz) | 3 | 14 | 55 | 157 | ||
| Intel Core i5 2500K (3.3GHz) | 4 | 11 | 25 | 148 | ||
| Intel Core i7 3960X (3.3GHz) | 4 | 11 | 30 | 167 | ||
Cachemem shows us a 5 cycle increase in latency. Hits in L3 can take 20% longer to get to the core that requested the data, if this is correct. For small, lightly threaded applications, you may see a slight regression in performance compared to Sandy Bridge. More likely than not however, the ~2 - 2.5x increase in L3 cache size will more than make up for the added latency. Also note that despite the large cache and thanks to its ring bus, Sandy Bridge E's L3 is still lower latency than Gulftown's.
| Memory Bandwidth Comparison - Sandra 2012.01.18.10 | |||||
| Intel Core i7 3960X (Quad Channel, DDR3-1600) | Intel Core i7 2600K (Dual Channel, DDR3-1600) | Intel Core i7 990X (Triple Channel, DDR3-1333) | |||
| Aggregate Memory Bandwidth | 37.0 GB/s | 21.2 GB/s | 19.9 GB/s | ||
Memory bandwidth is also up significantly. Populating all four channels with DDR3-1600 memory, Sandy Bridge E delivered 37GB/s of bandwidth in Sandra's memory bandwidth test. Given the 51GB/s theoretical max of this configuration and a fairly standard 20% overhead, 37GB/s is just about what we want to see here.
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actionjksn - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
I'm pretty sure the motherboard makers will add the extra ports, even though the controllers aren't built into the processor or chipset.just4U - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
mmm double standards..hechacker1 - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
No, not double standards.This chip does outclass it's competition (50 plus percent) in some cases that are highly threaded.
It actually uses all of those transistors to be a speed daemon. Bulldozer just doesn't, even with its 2 billion transistors.
Phylyp - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
Does the 2+ billion transistor count reflect the 2 cores that are fused also, or only the active transistors?iceman-sven - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
I was interested in SB-E and the X79 platform, but i will skip it and continue to use my i7 965X. Maybe I go for IB-E, but it is doubtful, when the Nvidia Kepler GPU is released. What I really want is Haswell-E on something like a EVGA Classified Super Record 2 (SR-2) class Motherboard.cearny - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
Thanks for including the Chromium build time test :)For GCC people out there, why not a Kernel build time test in the future also?
DanNeely - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
Actually why not do a chromium build in GCC to make the two numbers more directly comparable. Doing it this way will give a 'free' article on which compiler is better.ckryan - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
What about the corresponding release of Intel's next SSD?We had speculated that since it missed it's initial window that it would have been released on the 14th with SB-E. I guess we were wrong again.
Anyone want to field this?
xpclient - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
Why? You have got newer multicore specific benchmarks that prove otherwise wise guy? Then share them.xpclient - Monday, November 14, 2011 - link
Here's a Jan 2010 benchmark: http://www.infoworld.com/d/windows/windows-7s-kill... Fact: You would need 8 core machines before Windows 7 can outperform XP.