Intel Core i7 4960X (Ivy Bridge E) Review
by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 3, 2013 4:10 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Ivy Bridge
- Ivy Bridge-E
Video Transcoding
With our lightly threaded tests behind us, it's time to move to more CPU intensive pastures.
We migrated to the latest verison of the x264 HD benchmark which features a much newer version of x264 and a much heavier workload. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.
Here we see all of the 6-core parts rise to the top, including Intel's old Gulftown based Core i7-990X. Despite being a few years old at this point, the 990X's 6-core design and relatively high clock speed gives it better performance here than the quad-core Haswell 4770K.
The 4960X manages to be around 30% faster than the old 990X, and is 40% faster than the 4770K. For heavily threaded applications, there's simply no replacement for more cores.
Just like I did earlier, I dusted off one of our really old x264 tests so we'd have comparison data to even older CPUs including the Pentium 4 and Penryn based Extreme Edition parts:
The 4960X manages to deliver nearly 3x the performance of Intel's flagship from 6 years ago. The Pentium EE 955 comparison is even more insane. IVB-E is basically an order of magnitude faster than the last high-end Pentium 4s to come out of Intel back in 2005.
3D Rendering
Our new POV-Ray benchmark uses the latest beta binary (3.7RC6) and runs through both single and multithreaded versions of the popular raytracing benchmark.
Isolating a single core shows us exactly what we're missing by having Ivy Bridge at the heart of the 4960X instead of Haswell. Here the 4770K manages a 16% performance advantage over the 4960X, which costs 3x as much and draws substantially more power. Looking at AMD's FX-8350 however it's clear why Intel can get away with launching a high-end 6-core chip without its latest cores. Piledriver's single threaded performance falls somewhere between Nehalem and Sandy Bridge, giving Intel room to launch another Ivy Bridge based high-end SKU in 2013 and get away with it.
The multithreaded performance story is very different. Here even the Gulftown based 990X is faster than Haswell thanks to its six cores. The 4960X is 40% faster than the Haswell based 4770K. Even AMD's FX-8350 does really well here, basically equalling Haswell's performance.
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
In Cinebench, the single threaded Haswell/IVB-E gap narrows to 5%.
Multithreaded performance continues to be just stellar. Here the 4960X is just under 50% faster than the 4770K. Note the relatively small gap between the 4960X and the SNB-E based 3970X however - the performance gain is only 5%. The bulk of Ivy Bridge's advancements were in GPU performance (not applicable to IVB-E) and power consumption (which we'll get to shortly).
Our final two Cinebench tests use the R10 benchmark to enable a comparison to more/older data points:
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Kevin G - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
I believe the only way to get a specially binned or configured chip from Intel is to be an OEM and order a large volume. For an unlocked Xeon, the only chance Intel would release such a system would be under contract for a super computer contract that also used liquid cooling.OEM's like HP, Dell and Apple can also acquire specifically binned chips for a premium if the OEM wants something better or for a discount if Intel has excess inventories of low grade chips they need to sell.
1Angelreloaded - Tuesday, September 3, 2013 - link
Apple was the one who petitioned Intel to put the GPU on Die, so they could get away selling at higher prices with a lower cost to them. Do like I do BLAME APPLE.colonelclaw - Tuesday, September 3, 2013 - link
In conclusion, if you're an enthusiast who wants a high core count, Xeon is your only choice. For the price of the top-end Xeon you can buy a pretty decent second-hand car!We really need AMD to get back into the high-end game.
f0d - Tuesday, September 3, 2013 - link
yeah cpu's were much better when amd competed in the high endlets just hope they can pull a good one out of somewhere
Casper42 - Tuesday, September 3, 2013 - link
Hate to burst your bubble but AMD is going through a bit of a reset right now.Opteron 6400s in 2014. Minimal increase in performance.
Next Gen Ground Up architecture is 2015, or when you get your AMD rep drunk at a trade show, you hear more likely 2016. If they can pull it off, this is where they will become a player again.
Most of their attention at the moment is Trinity style APUs with minimal Core Counts just like Intel's desktop stuff.
DG4RiA - Tuesday, September 3, 2013 - link
When are these E5 V2 Xeons gonna be out ? Why release this first instead of the new Xeons ?Hardly any performance increase after 22 months. I get that they want to be able to sell the 12-cores Xeon for three grands instead of one, but why can't they just add two extra cores to 4960X instead of just adding 200MHz ?
Casper42 - Tuesday, September 3, 2013 - link
E5-2600 v2 is next week, Septh 10thE5-4600 v2 and E5-2400 v2 will be very end of 2013 or early 2014.
E7 (Ivy EX) will also be like January 2014. 15 cores is what I am hearing there.
DG4RiA - Wednesday, September 4, 2013 - link
Thanks for the info. I'm looking at dual socket build, so hopefully these V2 Xeon is worth the wait.Shadowmaster625 - Tuesday, September 3, 2013 - link
Intel is so greedy. They could have made this chip 10 core / 20 thread and the die size still would have been less than SNB-E. For a high end part, a chip this small is just a slap in the face. I hope their greed costs them lots of $$.ShieTar - Tuesday, September 3, 2013 - link
Sure. Also, the TDP at close to 4 GHz would have been 220W. And the majority of customers would have tried to overclock them and drive 300W through them. And either complained because they damage too easily, or because of the lousy overclocking potential.