Intel Ivy Bridge-E Pricing Leaked
by Jarred Walton on July 31, 2013 7:05 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- LGA2011
- Ivy Bridge-E
- Pricing
Yesterday VR-Zone leaked information on the initial pricing expected for Ivy Bridge-E (IVB-E) processors, which we’ve reproduce in the table below. The LGA-2011 platform is an interesting departure from the norm for consumers, so we also wanted to discuss what’s happening there and why we’re only seeing IVB-E launch after Haswell just came out. But first, let’s start with a discussion of pricing; we’ve included the existing Sandy Bridge-E (SNB-E) as well. (Note that it appears the image from VR-Zone has incorrect Turbo Boost clocks for the IVB-E parts; we provided earlier estimates last month.)
| Ivy Bridge-E Leaked Pricing and Specs | |||||||
| SKU | i7-4960X | i7-3970X | i7-3960X | i7-4930K | i7-3930K | i7-4820K | i7-3820 |
| Cores/Threads | 6/12 | 6/12 | 6/12 | 6/12 | 6/12 | 4/8 | 4/8 |
| Speed/Turbo (GHz) | 3.6/4.0 | 3.5/4.0 | 3.3/3.9 | 3.4/3.9 | 3.2/3.8 | 3.7/3.9 | 3.6/3.8 |
| L3 Cache | 15MB | 15MB | 15MB | 12MB | 12MB | 10MB | 10MB |
| TDP | 130W | 150W | 130W | 130W | 130W | 130W | 130W |
| Price (Online) | $990 |
$1,059 ($1,030) |
$1,059 ($1,070) |
$555 |
$594 ($570) |
$310 |
$305 ($300) |
There are a few interesting takeaways this round. First, pricing on the IVB-E parts is mostly lower than the SNB-E SKUs they’re replacing. We expect IPC to be slightly better on IVB-E thanks to architectural enhancements, so in general we’re looking at improved performance at lower prices. The 4820K is the exception, priced $5 more than the 3820. IVB-E also reduces the TDP on the highest performing 4960X part to 130W, which makes sense considering the process shrink.
Something else to note is that the upcoming i7-4820K is also priced quite a bit lower than i7-4770K (and even i7-3770K). If you’re not worried about Intel’s iGPU solutions—which is likely the case if you’re considering LGA-2011—the price point is now even lower, and you still get quad-channel memory and additional PCIe 3.0 lanes. Even the LGA-2011 motherboards are priced relatively competitively these days, at least for the mainstream models—LGA-1150 boards with four DIMM slots and at least two PCIe 3.0 slots are only $20-$40 cheaper, and the higher quality offerings can even surpass pricing for LGA-2011 boards.
The more interesting discussion is what we’re not seeing. For one, there’s still no inexpensive hex-core solution; you either spend $555 or more, or you get a quad-core part. Considering the process shrink, IVB-E chips should be quite a bit smaller and therefore less expensive for Intel to manufacture relative to SNB-E, and while reduced pricing is nice many were hoping for a budget hex-core processor.
The other item we won’t see (which isn’t in the above table) is new chipsets/motherboards for Ivy Bridge-E. Oh, there will likely be a few new boards, but this isn’t a new platform launch. IVB-E should be a drop-in replacement for SNB-E with a BIOS update, and all of the Tier-1 OEMs are promising support for the new processors. But if you already have SNB-E, will IVB-E be enough of an upgrade to justify the expense of a new processor? We’ll have to wait for the official launch for that discussion, but at least right now that’s looking like a tough sell.
The question most people have with IVB-E is why it even exists in the first place—SNB-E launched after IVB on the consumer side and over a year after SNB showed up, and with Haswell having just come out we’re still a month or more away from IVB-E. Shouldn’t we be looking for Haswell-E instead? The answer is actually a lot less complex than you might suspect, and it goes along with the lack of new motherboards/chipset. LGA-2011 is basically the consumer version of Intel’s Xeon platform; nothing more, nothing less. Oh, you get unlocked CPU multipliers and motherboards targeted more at the enthusiast market (frequently with tons of overclocking options), and you don’t need ECC memory, but LGA-2011 is just a minor tweak to the single-socket Xeon offerings.
Unlike the desktop world where yearly upgrades are common and even encouraged by the manufacturers, Xeon plays in a different market that doesn’t like rapid change. The server cadence from Intel is two generations of support, so each new platform stays around a lot longer. Bringing in Haswell-E would require moving to a new socket, violating the every socket has to stick around for two generations requirement in Xeon-land. So we're stuck with Ivy Bridge for the next year, with Haswell-E likely showing up in late 2014. Paraphrasing what we said back at the Sandy Bridge-E launch: If you happen to have a heavily threaded workload that needs the absolute best performance, it looks like Ivy Bridge-E can deliver. Professional overclockers are also likely to be thrilled that IVB-E should take care of the cold boot bugs seen on other platforms. But for many users, the new Haswell platforms are likely to be more compelling.
What's going to be in your next build? Are you waiting for Ivy Bridge-E or is a quad-core Haswell more than enough? Or is there something else entirely?
Source: VR-Zone
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Heavensrevenge - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
Actually I just swapped out my Primary boot SSD + OS which is Win 8.1 of about a month old, so all software configs and compilation toolchain+compiler are identical. Mainly the massive difference is moving to the newer generation CPU+chipset but that enough has an astounding performance boost.It's ALL from the Haswell improvements with memory latency etc, it has made a larger impact for me than something like a Win(crap)RAR compression benchmark comparison :P
I'm just saying my personal findings to be far more impressive and different than the benchmarks have noted what Haswell + what Haswell's plug into offer in terms of performance.
JarredWalton - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I'm still not quite getting your comparison. What was the new laptop (and hardware), and what's the old laptop (and hardware)?extide - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
It sounds like your old laptop was probably throttling the CPU when all 4 cores/8 threads were loaded, and now with the new haswell setup you are not throttling and thus seeing a significant perf boost because you weren't actually getting all the perf you should have on the Ivy setup in the first place.Heavensrevenge - Saturday, August 3, 2013 - link
Wow... how idiotic can people be? I don't know how much more straightforward I can be with the Haswell CPU being a huge win that doesn't match online benchmarks. No I wasn't throttling, that would have been stupid.Get your own Haswell to find out. I don't care if you take my word for my results...
But my results = 45 minutes compile of the ENTIRE chromium source tree using vs2010 (the toolchain that works best) on this i7-4700HQ down from 1 hour and 10-15 minutes on the old i7-3610QM CPU.
That's around a 30 minute decrease in time needed.
Therefore this i7-4700HQ mobile CPU approximately matches the i7-2600 non-k version desktop CPU I also have in terms of computational power at it's normal 3.4GHz clock. The old laptop was a G75VW and the new one is a G750JW, the new model with the Haswell inside it.
Take it or leave it.
silenceisgolden - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
I have an i7 930 with ASUS P6X58D - Premium mobo and this is too much of a disappointment for me to upgrade. If Haswell had more improvements to the chipset I would probably have bought that by now, but it looks like I'll just wait till Haswell-E.chizow - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I upgraded from i7 920 and EVGA X58 Classified and the upgrade to Haswell/Z87 was well worth it. The improvements to the platform alone were worth it (USB 3.0/SATA6G), but beyond that you get much better UEFI BIOS, and much less power consumption. I'd estimate my system is pulling about 100W less between the CPU and the extremely power hungry X58 Classified.RAID0 with 3xSATA6G HyperX SSDs in RAID0 is just awesome, 1400MB/s seq reads, 1000MB/s seq writes. And I still have SATA6G ports for my Samsung 840 boot SSD and 2 mechanical drives for storage. Pretty sick stuff.
Rick83 - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
I agree, my sister's 920 on X58 is having troubles, and now I can safely recommend her the quad-core IB-E as a replacement.Sadly memory prices have gone up, so it's no longer safe to say "just get 64GB of RAM", is another advantage over Haswell, besides more PCIe lanes. Also, it's a bit of a bummer, that X79 didn't see an upgrade. More fast SATA and all-USB 3 would have been nice to have, but I suppose it's not interesting for the server market, and while merging the DMI-end of X79 with the controller-end of Z87 might be possible, the market is probably too small.
yhselp - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
The most exciting thing of the Ivy Bridge-E launch is that the budget SKU is now unlocked. People looking to get more PCIe lanes, memory overclock and still overclock their CPU but don't need six core can now do it without spending overboard. This would be useful for people looking to game at 4K on 3-4 GPUs and need the PCIe bandwidth. While a 4770K on a PLX-equipped board would do quite well too, if there's a worst case scenario where one might be concerned with lane bandwidth that is 4K.madmilk - Wednesday, July 31, 2013 - link
It's not too exciting -- SNB-E lets you increase BCLK to some preset values. Combine this with decreasing the multipliers and the 3820 is essentially just as overclockable as its bigger brothers.yhselp - Thursday, August 1, 2013 - link
Pumping the BCLK too high to get a better overclock might be damaging to other components; not to mention you would get a better OC from a 4820K plus a refined architecture at the same price. I agree it's not super exciting and it's not a huge improvement, but it might be worth it for some people. Especially those looking to game at 4K on 3-4 GPUs.