Intel Launching Ivy Bridge Desktop Processors This Week?

I can't see them limiting the GPU side a lot between the i5-3570 & i5-3570K like that chart shows. Considering current Sandy Bridge parts use the HD Graphics 3000 naming scheme, having the multiplier-locked version with "HD Graphics 2500" seems out of place.
 
I'm interested to see if this is true. I've been holding off on upgrading my Core 2 Quad Q9550 for Ivy Bridge. Up until very recently I've not seen any reason to upgrade, but with games like Skyrim and SWTOR, I have been CPU bottlenecked so it's time to move on.

I'm sure I'd be quite happy with the i5-3570's performance (I have an i5-2500 development machine at work that feels really quick), but I wonder if one of the i7s would be worth the extra cost just to remain usable for longer. The Q9550 has been "good enough" for a lot longer than any previous generation of CPU I've owned, and I'd be willing to pay extra if I could get an Ivy Bridge CPU that would remain usable for 4 years.
 
I'm excited for some hot Ivy Bridge action. I've been very pleased with my first gen i7 920 and its sweet overclocking ability.

Ivy Bridge paired with the upcoming Kepler nvidia chipset should be a sweet upgrade.
 
I'm interested to see if this is true. I've been holding off on upgrading my Core 2 Quad Q9550 for Ivy Bridge. Up until very recently I've not seen any reason to upgrade, but with games like Skyrim and SWTOR, I have been CPU bottlenecked so it's time to move on.

I'm sure I'd be quite happy with the i5-3570's performance (I have an i5-2500 development machine at work that feels really quick), but I wonder if one of the i7s would be worth the extra cost just to remain usable for longer. The Q9550 has been "good enough" for a lot longer than any previous generation of CPU I've owned, and I'd be willing to pay extra if I could get an Ivy Bridge CPU that would remain usable for 4 years.

I hadn't though about it that way until I read your post, but damn my q9650 has been with me a while now. I also skipped sandybridge and have been waiting on ivybridge for about the past 6 months or so now that it's finally starting to show its age in new games. Personally I'll be after an i7-3770k.
 
I can't see them limiting the GPU side a lot between the i5-3570 & i5-3570K like that chart shows. Considering current Sandy Bridge parts use the HD Graphics 3000 naming scheme, having the multiplier-locked version with "HD Graphics 2500" seems out of place.

It's consistent with the previous generation, where almost all multiplier-locked i5 parts used HD 2000 graphics.

Some exceptions included the Core i5-2405S (intended to give it another selling point over the i5 2400S and i3 2100T).

There are models of the i3 with HD 3000 graphics, but those parts will not be refreshed until later in the year.

My thoughts about going for HT: I don't know if this will hold water, but from the Anandtech preview it looked like they managed to tweak something in the Hyperthreading implementation of Ivy Bridge. Games that are notorious for not being HT-friendly on Sandy saw no performance falloff with the Ivy rendition. Perhaps they have analyzed real-world usage and resource contentions and have added fixes for those situations? Or maybe I'm just reading too much into a preview :D

I'm specifically referring to Dirt 3 HQ and Starcraft 2, where the 2500k is faster than the 2600k. Not only is the 3770k significantly faster than both chips, the performance gap between the 2600k and 3770k is surprisingly large.


We will have to wait for real benchmarks to be certain, but if Intel has tweaked HT I think there would be no reason not to spend a little more on the feature now.
 
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I hadn't though about it that way until I read your post, but damn my q9650 has been with me a while now. I also skipped sandybridge and have been waiting on ivybridge for about the past 6 months or so now that it's finally starting to show its age in new games. Personally I'll be after an i7-3770k.

I'm still running my q9450 at 3.2 and have been wanting to up to sb for a while but couldn't justify the price since it has been kicking ass for so long. But ib looks great and now I think I have enough reasons to upgrade, the new i5s look great, but those i7s look to be priced great!

Looking forward to the reviews.
 
What does the K mean? Looking at that chart the 3570K and 3570 look exactly the same except the price and the HD Graphics Model number (which I would disable anyway).
 
K means you can overclock by raising the multiplier over the stock setting. Sandy Bridge had the same feature.
 
The "K" denotes the part is unlocked multiplier. It costs more because they did less with it. Right.....
 
OK, thanks. I would just go with non K for less money and up the frequency. I don't do massive OC anyway because there is not much to be gained from it.
 
I'm happy with my SB-E in my main rig for now, but I would really like an Ivy Bridge Xeon E3 V2 for my server...

I'm thinking the Xeon E3-1265L v2

I wonder when we'll see these...
 
OK, thanks. I would just go with non K for less money and up the frequency. I don't do massive OC anyway because there is not much to be gained from it.

Unfortunately, doesn't really work that way anymore. Can only get around 6% by raising the base clock. "FSB" overclocking died with Nehalem/Westmere.
 
wake me up when we get cpus with 16 cores or 10 ghz that intel promised aeons ago to be feasible by now.
 
Unfortunately, doesn't really work that way anymore. Can only get around 6% by raising the base clock. "FSB" overclocking died with Nehalem/Westmere.

Exactly.

if you want to do any noticeable overclocking, you are going to want a K branded part.

the price difference is usually only just over $10, so its not a biggie.

Biggest deal is if you were planning on using VT-d, which you lose with the K parts, but if you were, good luck finding a compatible desktop motherboard anyway :p
 
OK, thanks again. Guess I will pay the extra and get the K model then. I have Lynfield now and can OC by upping the frequency.
 
I believe like SB (sandy bridge) the frequency will be pretty much locked or limited to not much more than the stock setting.

Actually it looks like IB users may get the option of 133 MHz BCLK. SB-E has an additional 125 MHz BCLK option, but there's no reason you can't get a respectable overclock with the slightly wider window of 133 MHZ increments.

http://palupix.blogspot.com/2011/08/intels-ivy-bridge-and-sandy-bridge-e.html

Since i5 "locked" Intel CPUs allow you to use any multiplier below the stock value + 4, you should be able to overclock Ivy Bridge quite well even without a fully-unlocked CPU (see articles about 3820 overclocking). We will have to wait and see if this is true, but if we have 133 MHz BCLK you will no-longer have to pay more for overclocking.

Also, all the hardcore enthusiasts who have been calling Sandy Bridge "too easy" will be very happy with this :D
 
TBH, I don't see that table as being anywhere near accurate, but I would love to be proven wrong. There is no flagship $1000 proc for review sites to ogle (Even SB-E got that, natch) and the pricing scheme is too compressed. I'm calling BS until I see them on the market at those prices.
 
TBH, I don't see that table as being anywhere near accurate, but I would love to be proven wrong. There is no flagship $1000 proc for review sites to ogle (Even SB-E got that, natch) and the pricing scheme is too compressed. I'm calling BS until I see them on the market at those prices.

Intel can't charge over the realm of $350 for a top-end Ivy Bridge processor because that's the entry-level price for a Socket 2011 quad-core, and there's too small a performance difference between the two architectures to demand a premium. They offer the enhanced Socket 2011 platform (along with 6-cores as an option) to entice you to spend $1000. Intel used to release these overpriced processors on the same platform as everything else, but decided to create a distinction starting with Nehalem on 1366.

You won't see another $1000 review unit until IB-E releases
 
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So the stock speeds have finally caught up with my overclocked i860. Not bad for a 2 year old $200 Microcenter CPU.

The 3770K + a new motherboard is still a little pricey for the 20%-30% best case overclock (on air) improvement I'd see.
 
Yea, what happened to Moore's law?

All Moore stated was that the number of transistors on a chip will double every 1.5 to 2 years.

The first complete CPU on one chip was the 4bit Intel 4004 launched in late 1971. It had 2300 transistors.

If you follow that through and double the trasistor count every 1.5 and 2 years respectively you find that more's law predicts that new CPU's launched today should have between 2.4 and 309 billion transistors.

Transistor counts of recent CPU's (different sources have different numbers so take these with a grain of salt)
Intel Sandy Bridge-E (6 cores): 2.27B transistors
AMD Llano: 1.45B transistors
Intel Ivy Bridge: 1.4B transistors
AMD Bulldozer (8 cores): 1.2B transistors
Intel Gulftown (6 cores): 1.17B transistors
Intel Sandy Bridge (4 cores) : 1.16B transistors
AMD Thuban (6 cores): 904M transistors
AMD Deneb (4 core): 758M transistors.

So yes, if you use the first single chip CPU as a starting point then we have fallen behind Moore's law. Only the Sandy Bridge-E is even close to the range predicted by Moore's law, and this is before figuring in that GPU's have been added on die.

Even Moore himself cautioned that the law would not be sustainable forever. Eventually you'd run up against the laws of physics and it would be more and more difficult to keep shrinking silicon. He predicted we'd have to move beyond traditional silicon for future designs, and when either happened (running up against physics, or switching away from traditional silicon) his law would no longer apply.
 
So the stock speeds have finally caught up with my overclocked i860. Not bad for a 2 year old $200 Microcenter CPU.

The 3770K + a new motherboard is still a little pricey for the 20%-30% best case overclock (on air) improvement I'd see.

You are neglecting the IPC advantage Sandy and Ivy bridge have over Lynnfield.

Lynnfield -> Sandy Bridge ~20% IPC gain.
Sandy Bridge -> Ivy Bridge ~6% IPC gain.

So overall, an Ivy Bridge chip at the same clock speed is about 27% faster than a lynnfield.

So the 3.9Ghz turbo seen in this chart is equivalent to your Lynnfield at ~5Ghz...

There is more to performance than just clock frequency.
 
I'm still sporting woodcrest in my main rig... looking forward to some Ivy.
I thought we were getting more PCIe lanes though :(
 
I thought we were getting more PCIe lanes though :(


And as a technicality, you could view PCI-e 3.0 as more PCI-e lanes since the bandwidth is doubled over 2.0:

PCI-e 3.0 8x + 8x XFire/SLI = PCI-e 2.0 = 16x + 16x

Of course, this math only works if two PCI-e 3.0 GPU's are installed in XFire/SLI and no other PCI-e cards/peripherals are accompanying them in a motherboard that can do 8x + 8x XFire/SLI PCI-e 3.0... :D
 
fwiw, an ivybridge at 4GHz would likely outperform a 12+GHz pentium 4 so...

Yet you'd think that such a statement wouldn't need to be made, as I was certain everyone would have figured that out 10 years ago with the athlon CPUs.That being, clock rate does not directly equate to CPU power.
 
Yet you'd think that such a statement wouldn't need to be made, as I was certain everyone would have figured that out 10 years ago with the athlon CPUs.That being, clock rate does not directly equate to CPU power.
When the P4 came out, the P3 actually outperformed it when clocked at the same speed. Intel wanted to beat AMD in the speed race. AMD got to 1ghz first, hopefully they will find their way back on top someday. I been using AMD since their K6 series, had an intel 486dx2 before that. Now I'm looking at replacing my Phenom II 940BE with a i7-3930k.
 
I've got an i7 SB and I just don't see the point of this as an upgrade? Where the hell are my 6-core CPUS with HT? I want to see 12 threads in my task manager before I upgrade. 4 cores seems so ancient to me now.
 
I've got an i7 SB and I just don't see the point of this as an upgrade? Where the hell are my 6-core CPUS with HT? I want to see 12 threads in my task manager before I upgrade. 4 cores seems so ancient to me now.

Yeah an IB 6 core with PCI 3.0 native motherboard SLI/CFX SATA6/USB 3.0 would be one built to last for a long while. That would be the reason to upgrade.
 
I've got an i7 SB and I just don't see the point of this as an upgrade? Where the hell are my 6-core CPUS with HT? I want to see 12 threads in my task manager before I upgrade. 4 cores seems so ancient to me now.

They're out there, but you'll have to spend a ton of money for the LGA2011 platform. And that's the sole reason why we'll never see them on the LGA1155 platform. We're likely to not see 6c/12t and 8c/16t processors on the standard platform until Haswell or Maybe even Skylake/Skymont.
 
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