Intel Launches Sandy Bridge-E Series Processors 204
MojoKid writes "Today marks the release of Intel's Sandy Bridge-E processor family and its companion X79 Express chipset. The first processor to arrive is the Core i7-3960X Extreme Edition, a six-core chip manufactured using Intel's 32nm process node that features roughly 2.27 billion transistors. The initial batch of Sandy Bridge-E CPUs will feature 6 active execution cores that can each process two threads simultaneously via Intel Hyper-Threading technology. Although, the chip's die actually has eight cores on board (two inactive), due to power and yield constraints, only six are active at this time. These processors will support up to 15MB of shared L3 Intel Smart Cache and feature integrated quad-channel memory controllers with official support for DDR3 memory at speeds up to 1600MHz, as well as 40 integrated PCI Express 3.0 compatible lanes. Performance-wise, Sandy Bridge-E pretty much crushes anything on the desktop currently, including AMD's pseudo 8-core FX-8150 processor."
Intel compiler & Windows OS in benchmarks (Score:4, Interesting)
How about some linux developer workload? Compile times? IDE performance? Java performance? PHP, Apache, PostgreSQL, MySQL performance? KDE/Gnome performance? CAD/CAM? Matlab or Octave? Bzip2/gzip/SSL/zip under Linux? I know some of these workloads depend on IO/graphics more than on CPU, but I'd like to see results anyway. And I'm sick and tired of reviews that run some Intel compiled synthetic benchmarks and then some games that primarily use GPU anyway. Phoronix is guilty of that as well- they should have more WORK workloads and less FPS counts for games. But at least they are trying- and Bulldozer performance under Linux/GCC isn't that bad compared to Intel CPUs as it is under Windows/ICC.
--Coder
But does it crush AMD's new 16 core processor ? (Score:3, Interesting)
no it doesnt. not when it comes only close with amd's 8 cores in multithreaded apps. 16 cores , becomes unmatchable.