Cheaper Intel 6C/12T CPU coming? Core i7-3910K spotted

[moonbogg]

Keep telling yourself that :whiste:

The mainstream i7 butthurt is strong on this thread.

I have a 3930k, but feel its not much better than a mainstream for gaming. Also, I apologize for calling you a noob. That was lame and uncalled for.

 

[blackened23]

Keep telling yourself that :whiste:

The mainstream i7 butthurt is strong on this thread.

You're acting awfully childish and confrontational over something silly. You could also make the same statement to yourself and it would be just as applicable.

Most of us like the 2011 platform. However, one must concede that for gaming, specifically, it doesn't offer a benefit overall for 99 out of 100 games. For some games it may very well be worse due to single threaded performance - You can find the 2 games out of 200 that might have a benefit. But then you have the other 198 that benefit more from better single threaded performance; whether you want to recognize it or not, most games either do not use or do not effectively use beyond 2 threads.

The real benefits of the E platform lie elsewhere, for the time being.

 

[Makaveli]

I suspect that power budget is why the six-core chips will remain soldered to their ihs's. The potential for that has me interested in overclocking a Haswell-E next year. I have a family member running Photo Shop who would enjoy a fast six-core system when the overclocking fun is done.

I think Haswell E is also my next upgrade but based on the performance of my current rig which is still great by my standards. That upgrade will just be to get access to a newer chipset and new instruction sets on the processor. I still expect there to be a nice performance gap since there is quite a boost of IPC from Westmere to Haswell. Only then it will be worth it, I use to be like most here upgrading all the time but after awhile I just found there is no point for small increases and quite a waste of money. I only move when I can get 50% greater performance now.

 

[ViRGE]

I thought is was a joke, but:

http://qdms.intel.com/dm/d.aspx/D2F9DF6E-EBFB-40D3-9F24-4975D0AE264B/PCN112319-00.pdf

Seems serious?

Apparently so. But nothing about this makes any sense. To release a new K-series SNB-E on the eve of the IVB-E launch? Intel has to be going after a specific market or something. Or maybe they just have a bunch of 6 core SNB-E CPUs they're trying to be rid of?

 

[SunnyD]

It's the epeen tingle, you're one of the lucky ones.

I don't see the point in 2011, IvyE isn't going to change much except power consumption which overclocked SBe is comparatively "bulldozer" like compared to Haswell. Even if you look at Triple GPU without PLX on Haswell 1150 it's still impossible to say 2011 has any real advantage.

But at the same time all of those same people said, "Hey, I've had that performance TWO GENERATIONS before you Haswell."

Personally, I don't really give a crap about the gaming side of it. Being a developer and a tinkerer, I'll be able to pile on more ram on my LGA2011 board than you ever will on your mainstream board, and I'll have more cores than you will for a good while to come. What's that mean? Faster code compilation, more VM's to run, faster databases. That's all I really care about.

The gaming? That's just an added bonus for when I don't feel like being a grown-up anymore.

Oh, and I didn't have to change platforms to do it.

 

[NTMBK]

Apparently so. But nothing about this makes any sense. To release a new K-series SNB-E on the eve of the IVB-E launch? Intel has to be going after a specific market or something. Or maybe they just have a bunch of 6 core SNB-E CPUs they're trying to be rid of?

Probably a bunch of poor-binned 8-core Xeon dies. IB E5 Xeons are round the corner, at which point SB E5 Xeons are dead- IB's power consumption improvements will matter a lot in the server market. Might as well take the dies which didn't hit their clock/power consumption targets and dump them as an entry level "enthusiast" part.

 

[JDG1980]

They're both good platforms -- but again, enthusiast seems to be getting more attention beginning in 2014. My theory is that Intel is lowering the entry price points for the E platform to kick things off and I also think they're shuffing more desktop users to the E platform. So users that would traditionally have purchased a mainstream "K" SKU in the past will purchase an E platform instead with a lower priced CPU.....Should be interesting to see what happens. Again, all of this is theory on my part.

I suspect that Intel's long-term plan is to have the E platform (LGA 2011 or whatever they come up with as a successor) as the only line of socketed chips, both on the desktop and server sides. With desktop sales going down, there have to be some people in Intel wondering if it makes sense to have 2 different lines of enthusiast chips (LGA 1155/1150 "K" and LGA 2011 "E").

I wouldn't be surprised if in 5-10 years your choice is between a cheap Atom (or whatever they call it) board, a somewhat more expensive board with a BGA Core CPU, and a traditional socketed platform with LGA 2011. They will have to drastically cut down the number of SKUs for this to be feasible (you can't expect the mobo makers to produce variants for each of the minor clock tweaks on i3/i5), but I see it as the likely way the market is going. Enthusiasts still get the modularity and power we need, at a fairly reasonable price, and everyone else gets a board that is powerful enough for 99% of needs and can be made small and energy-efficient.

 

[Makaveli]

I suspect that Intel's long-term plan is to have the E platform (LGA 2011 or whatever they come up with as a successor) as the only line of socketed chips, both on the desktop and server sides. With desktop sales going down, there have to be some people in Intel wondering if it makes sense to have 2 different lines of enthusiast chips (LGA 1155/1150 "K" and LGA 2011 "E").

I wouldn't be surprised if in 5-10 years your choice is between a cheap Atom (or whatever they call it) board, a somewhat more expensive board with a BGA Core CPU, and a traditional socketed platform with LGA 2011. They will have to drastically cut down the number of SKUs for this to be feasible (you can't expect the mobo makers to produce variants for each of the minor clock tweaks on i3/i5), but I see it as the likely way the market is going. Enthusiasts still get the modularity and power we need, at a fairly reasonable price, and everyone else gets a board that is powerful enough for 99% of needs and can be made small and energy-efficient.

I can see this and totally agree.

 

[Aikouka]

ASRock's bios was broken with the freezing.

I don't think it matters anymore, but that's been fixed. It's pretty pathetic that it existed in the first place, but what can ya do? Although, I am still getting a BSOD on hal.dll about once a month. I haven't figured out exactly what's causing it yet though. :\

Yeah, I don't know why anybody buys the mainstream platform at this point. My next purchase will be an Ivy Bridge E.

Because Intel insists upon a silly release cadence that makes the enthusiast part old hat by the time it's released. Honestly, if you're going for a quad-core and maybe one or two GPUs, why would you waste your time with the enthusiast line? If you absolutely need 16x on both slots (for some reason unbeknownst to me), they do have PLX-equipped mainstream boards.

If Intel released both lines at the same time with the same architecture, I'm not even sure which I would go with.

 

[Gillbot]

You're acting awfully childish and confrontational over something silly. You could also make the same statement to yourself and it would be just as applicable.

Most of us like the 2011 platform. However, one must concede that for gaming, specifically, it doesn't offer a benefit overall for 99 out of 100 games. For some games it may very well be worse due to single threaded performance - You can find the 2 games out of 200 that might have a benefit. But then you have the other 198 that benefit more from better single threaded performance; whether you want to recognize it or not, most games either do not use or do not effectively use beyond 2 threads.

The real benefits of the E platform lie elsewhere, for the time being.

I agree, IF your main area of concern is gaming.

But at the same time all of those same people said, "Hey, I've had that performance TWO GENERATIONS before you Haswell."

Personally, I don't really give a crap about the gaming side of it. Being a developer and a tinkerer, I'll be able to pile on more ram on my LGA2011 board than you ever will on your mainstream board, and I'll have more cores than you will for a good while to come. What's that mean? Faster code compilation, more VM's to run, faster databases. That's all I really care about.

The gaming? That's just an added bonus for when I don't feel like being a grown-up anymore.

Oh, and I didn't have to change platforms to do it.

This ^

I use mine for many things and I don't game much, but when I do, I know I can have the power behind it available.

 

[blackened23]

Well I feel like a year from now this will be a non issue. I do really think that intel will be moving most LGA processors to the enthusiast platform in 2014. It doesn't make sense to have two lines of LGA processors due to the direction of the market (eg mobile). The great news is that E processors won't necessarily be cost prohibitive as many others have considered them in the past; they will have perfectly reasonable price points - the 4820 will be an unlocked processor and i'm assuming that it will cost right under the 300$ mark. Pretty good news all around if this is indeed the direction intel is taking.

 

[frozentundra123456]

But at the same time all of those same people said, "Hey, I've had that performance TWO GENERATIONS before you Haswell."

Personally, I don't really give a crap about the gaming side of it. Being a developer and a tinkerer, I'll be able to pile on more ram on my LGA2011 board than you ever will on your mainstream board, and I'll have more cores than you will for a good while to come. What's that mean? Faster code compilation, more VM's to run, faster databases. That's all I really care about.

The gaming? That's just an added bonus for when I don't feel like being a grown-up anymore.

Oh, and I didn't have to change platforms to do it.

Did you really intentionally mean to insult all gamers, or did it just slip out? Dont really see that gaming is any less of a viable hobby for "grown ups" than anything else. After all doesnt being a "grown up" mean not having to be told what your hobbies can be by some poster on the internet?

 

[moonbogg]

Did you really intentionally mean to insult all gamers, or did it just slip out? Dont really see that gaming is any less of a viable hobby for "grown ups" than anything else. After all doesnt being a "grown up" mean not having to be told what your hobbies can be by some poster on the internet?

I felt the sting from that one too, lol. It made me take a look at myself and ask "Am I a grown up? Should I be more like a non-gaming adult?" Then I said SCREW THAT, and I currently look forward to pwning sickly on BF3 tonight just like I did last night, on my slow 3930k at that.

 

[crashtech]

SunnyD used the pronoun "I," not "We," guys. Doesn't pay to be hypersensitive on an Internet forum.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

I don't want to grow up though

 

[Carfax83]

I have a 3930k, but feel its not much better than a mainstream for gaming. Also, I apologize for calling you a noob. That was lame and uncalled for.

If you remember, I had a dilemma when deciding to go for a 3930k or a 4770k. In the end, I opted for the 3930k because I banked on the fact that games would become progressively multithreaded (plus I liked the added flexibility for multiple GPUs) as time went by due to the arrival of the new consoles.

Most current game engines don't scale well past three cores, because the engines were primarily designed to run on the triple core Xenon CPU. A fourth thread increases performance, but not nearly as much as going from two to three.

I expect this to change with the new game engines like the Unreal Engine 4, Frostbite 3, Red Engine 3, Ubisoft's Disrupt engine etcetera. These game engines should scale well to at least 8 threads, and more..

 

[Sweepr]

Here's an interesting analysis of porting to PS4 (from PC). PS4 (at least current devkits) have two cores reserved by the OS, leaving 6 to game developers:

http://www.eurogamer.net/articles/digitalfoundry-how-the-crew-was-ported-to-playstation-4

 

[crashtech]

Maybe this Christmas will finally be the time moar cores come into their own, lol. Not like we haven't heard that tune before!

I have to admit, there would be a certain amount of schadenfreude in watching legions of i5 gamers suddenly jumping ship.

 

[SunnyD]

Did you really intentionally mean to insult all gamers, or did it just slip out? Dont really see that gaming is any less of a viable hobby for "grown ups" than anything else. After all doesnt being a "grown up" mean not having to be told what your hobbies can be by some poster on the internet?

And based on the charts provided, I don't really see how SB-E is any less viable for gaming along with providing so many more benefits for non-gaming purposes over mainstream parts. Perhaps that was blunt enough to understand?

Or maybe this: A good many days I come home from work and the last thing I want to do is dick around with more code or mess with one of my servers, so I will fire up game de'jur and waste a few hours of my evening while ignoring the fact that I should probably be doing other things like dishes, laundry, spending time with my wife or something. But it's nice to know the platform that I picked is more than capable of standing toe-to-toe with ~3 generations of mainstream platforms, and I've only bought it ONCE.

Does that clear things up for you on my personal usage and overall thoughts on the enthusiast platform that Intel put out?

I believe the takeaway here is that I'm trying to imply that LGA2011 has overall been a much better performance-to-value platform than trying to keep up with mainstream when you look at the big picture. There was absolutely nothing in my post directed towards any particular individual or demographic at all, explicit or implied..

 

[Arachnotronic]

Well I feel like a year from now this will be a non issue. I do really think that intel will be moving most LGA processors to the enthusiast platform in 2014. It doesn't make sense to have two lines of LGA processors due to the direction of the market (eg mobile). The great news is that E processors won't necessarily be cost prohibitive as many others have considered them in the past; they will have perfectly reasonable price points - the 4820 will be an unlocked processor and i'm assuming that it will cost right under the 300$ mark. Pretty good news all around if this is indeed the direction intel is taking.

I swear, we've got to be long lost relatives. This is what I have been saying ever since I heard about "Haswell Refresh".

 

[BallaTheFeared]

And based on the charts provided, I don't really see how SB-E is any less viable for gaming along with providing so many more benefits for non-gaming purposes over mainstream parts. Perhaps that was blunt enough to understand?

The charts provided were meant to demonstrate PCIe bandwidth, not CPU performance.

So many could also be none, nice that we have a choice to get the same performance even with triple card gaming without having to spend $600+ for a CPU, that's three times what I paid for my i5.

i7-3930k @ 4.7 is about 32% faster than a 4.7GHz i7-4770k in something like Cinebench but cost twice as much. It also uses twice as much power at idle, while using two and a half times as much power to deliver that 32% extra performance.

Or maybe this: A good many days I come home from work and the last thing I want to do is dick around with more code or mess with one of my servers, so I will fire up game de'jur and waste a few hours of my evening while ignoring the fact that I should probably be doing other things like dishes, laundry, spending time with my wife or something. But it's nice to know the platform that I picked is more than capable of standing toe-to-toe with ~3 generations of mainstream platforms, and I've only bought it ONCE.

Why are you trying to justify your use case to us? We get it, you need the power. Nobody said 2011 was a bad choice for you.

The last part is a logical fallacy, SBe can't keep up with Haswell in CPU limited gaming.

I believe the takeaway here is that I'm trying to imply that LGA2011 has overall been a much better performance-to-value platform than trying to keep up with mainstream when you look at the big picture. There was absolutely nothing in my post directed towards any particular individual or demographic at all, explicit or implied..

Based on data that wasn't meant to support such assertions. You don't need to defend your purchase, we understand it works for you.


Edit: Don't take it personally. For most users 2011 isn't a good buy, to some it's the only choice. Neither are wrong.

 

[SunnyD]

i7-3930k @ 4.7 is about 32% faster than a 4.7GHz i7-4770k in something like Cinebench but cost twice as much. It also uses twice as much power at idle, while using two and a half times as much power to deliver that 32% extra performance.

That power consumption comes for what cost though? A good bit more PCIe bandwidth overall (as provided via the chipset/motherboard - how many mainstream boards out of the box support Tri/Quad GPU?), and twice the memory bandwidth, along with two extra cores.

Of course the power budget is going to be higher - we're comparing a workstation/enthusiast-class platform to a mainstream platform.

And yes, as I pointed out, the cost is higher but if you were an early adopter or a generational spender, you've already saved yourself probably 33% over the lifespan of the socket/platform/generations if you picked up LGA2011 fairly early on. If you're jumping into it now, your amortization of the cost will probably span into the next enthusiast platform that Intel puts out, making it not as attractive an option.

That's all there is to it.

Edit: Don't take it personally. For most users 2011 isn't a good buy, to some it's the only choice. Neither are wrong.

For that majority of users, buying anything more than a G1610 and an H77 motherboard isn't a good choice either.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

That power consumption comes for what cost though? A good bit more PCIe bandwidth overall (as provided via the chipset/motherboard - how many mainstream boards out of the box support Tri/Quad GPU?), and twice the memory bandwidth, along with two extra cores.

Which the graphs showed was meaningless.. The bandwidth 2011 provides amounts to nothing over mainstream, even with MGPU.

Of course the power budget is going to be higher - we're comparing a workstation/enthusiast-class platform to a mainstream platform.

Actually it's because we're comparing dated 2010 tech to modern 2013 tech. Mainstream SB does just as poorly.

And yes, as I pointed out, the cost is higher but if you were an early adopter or a generational spender, you've already saved yourself probably 33% over the lifespan of the socket/platform/generations if you picked up LGA2011 fairly early on. If you're jumping into it now, your amortization of the cost will probably span into the next enthusiast platform that Intel puts out, making it not as attractive an option.

That's all there is to it.

Where are you saving? You aren't saving anything, from a perf/$ standpoint it's still the worst option from Intel. The only thing 2011 offers is absolute multithreaded performance, in every other metric it loses. If you need that performance great, it's a good choice for you. If not it's a bad choice, it will offer little to nothing over the more technically advanced mainstream platform.

For that majority of users, buying anything more than a G1610 and an H77 motherboard isn't a good choice either.

Correct, AMD and Intel offer products at different segments and depending on where you find yourself that will dictate what product is best for you and your needs.

 

[Gillbot]

So many could also be none, nice that we have a choice to get the same performance even with triple card gaming without having to spend $600+ for a CPU, that's three times what I paid for my i5.

i7-3930k @ 4.7 is about 32% faster than a 4.7GHz i7-4770k in something like Cinebench but cost twice as much. It also uses twice as much power at idle, while using two and a half times as much power to deliver that 32% extra performance.

Would it matter if I paid LESS for my 3930k than most people are spending on their 4770k's? My LGA2011 motherboard was LESS than most reasonable haswell boards as well. I paid LESS for my 2011 rig than many people are paying for current haswell setups and mine still performs as well.

Am I justifying my purchase? Not really, but for some people that did not early adopt LGA2011, yet got a good great deal a bit later on are much farther ahead in the game. That was also my advice to Rvenger earler as well. Let this platform mature a bit, prices will decline then jump in.

 

[BallaTheFeared]

No it wouldn't matter, because what some people manage to get isn't what everyone can get it would only matter to you and yours.