Ivy Bridge vs Sandy Bridge-E

[NikoDG]

The Wikipedia Sandy Bridge Article gives a fairly accurate overview of the IB and SB processors. According to this the Ivy Bridge will be able to maintain similar clocks, with lesser voltage thanks to it's smaller design, so there's some improvement there, though most desktop users aren't thinking of their power consumption all too much. But aside from similar clocks, we can expect the have a decrease L3 cache (at least in the high end models) where the current flagship chip has 15MB of L3 cache while the top tier Ivy Bridge chip only has 8MB L3 cache, this should result in an overall drop in performance shouldn't it? Unless maybe they plan on releasing better Ivy Bridge chips later on like they did with the Sandy Bridge-E's. Also, I'd like to point out the the Ivy Bridge line caps at 4 cores (while the SB-E line caps at 6 on the 3960X) yet another drop in performance there, though only in heavily threaded games and programs, but still. And lastly, they are building better GPU's into the Ivy Bridge, which for the lower end chips might be nice, but for the higher end ones basically anyone who buys one is going to put on their own GPU so it's kind of a waste of space, oh but wait, only the high end ones get the better GPU, nice going there Intel. Lol

 

Now personally, I do hope they release some chips to go into the higher end of the Ivy Bridge family to bring up to par (performance wise) with the Sandy Bridge-E's, a six threaded chip of the Ivy Bridge family with 15MB of L3 Cache would be pretty amazing in my opinion. Especially as the lower base voltages on the Ivy Bridge should allow better overclocks (oh look, there's your second pro). And also I wish they would remove that god awful GPU from the higher end ones, either adding something that will be of use to high end gamers, or reducing the price of the chip. Price of the chip, hmmm, with the smaller structure of the new chips I'm hoping that they will be lower in price that the Sandy Bridge chips, but that's just speculation.

 

Pros:

1) Less power consumption

2) Smaller design

3) Better overclocking potential (possibly?)

4) Lower price (hopefully?)

 

Cons:

1) Flagship chip has less cores and L3 Cache than current flaghsip

2) GPU on high end cards made obsolete by people buying PCIe GPU's

[d6bmg]

Ivy bride will gain benefit for their different architecture, whereas Sandy-bridge-E will remain best for gaming & enthusiast users. Talking about the differences between Ivy bridge & SB-E, one prime thing to consider is the pricing difference. Ivy bridge will replace sandy bridge as main stream processor & we will have to one one more year to get the replacement of the SB-E on LGA 2011 socket. Also lower TDP means high overclocking capability, which can't be overlooked.

[NikoDG]

Ivy bridge will replace sandy bridge as main stream processor & we will have to one one more year to get the replacement of the SB-E on LGA 2011 socket.

 

So does that mean that Intel is planning to re-use the 2011 socket when they release their upper tier Ivy Bridge processors? I mean is that known fact? Or just speculation.

Also, for people using their computer mostly for gaming, watching movies, maybe a little bit of encoding would there be any point in waiting for Ivy Bridge, or would it be better to get the Sandy Bridge-E and reuse the motherboard when the next 2011 socket ships come out? Keep in mind a lot of people are going to be waiting until about March anyways to upgrade (with those sexy new GPU's coming out).

Edited December 7, 2011 by NikoDG

[medbor]

It is a known fact that IB-E will replace SB-E on socket 2011 in H2 2012 (second half)

IB will be on par perfomance wise to SB, except for the better graphics, and perhaps overclocking (but i doubt it)

Ivy Bridge is really a less power hungry variant of Sandy Bridge, but with a better graphics chip.

 

Ivy bridge will release in March/April, but the extreme variant will release much later, probably october/november.

 

AMDs new GPUs will release in January, not march, and Nvidia will probably follow in Feb/March

Edited December 7, 2011 by medbor

[d6bmg]

I have posted nothing on the probability of re-using LGA2011 socket. Intel tend to change their socket with every release. So, there might be a chance, but no use of speculating anything, which none of us is sure of.

[NikoDG]

AMDs new GPUs will release in January, not march, and Nvidia will probably follow in Feb/March

 

Their main line of GPU's in January, yes. But the 79xx series will probably be out a little later I heard.

[jammin]

Ivy Bridge will replace socket 1155 Sandy Bridge chips, so the questions don't really apply. SB-E will still be the high end Intel platform for a while.

 

As for how good IB will be, there have been some slides doing the rounds:

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

http://hexus.net/tech/news/cpu/32856-intel-ivy-bridge-performance-numbers-slide/

Edited December 7, 2011 by jammin

[Nyt]

Ivy Bridge LGA1155 will be better than both SB and SB-E in gaming and will beat SB in editing but in editing the SB-E 6 core chips will win.

IB-E LGA2011 will be the flagship chip but wont be much better in gaming than IB since games hardly use 8 threads as it is.

 

When IB overclocks, we'll see some high 5.5Ghz+ frequencies as well as reaching 6GHz

[Tjj226_Angel]

I will be very curious to see the performance of the chip first hand. In theory that cache won't make a huge impact in performance because of the Tri-Gate transistor stuff. I am not getting my hopes up though. I did that with BD and look what happened. I just hope AMDs Pile Drive Chips will put the pressure on intel to shove more cache in their chips for the Tri. Resistors to take advantage of.

[NikoDG]

I will be very curious to see the performance of the chip first hand. In theory that cache won't make a huge impact in performance because of the Tri-Gate transistor stuff. I am not getting my hopes up though. I did that with BD and look what happened. I just hope AMDs Pile Drive Chips will put the pressure on intel to shove more cache in their chips for the Tri. Resistors to take advantage of.

 

Oh god, the BD, lol. I think from now on if a processor flops hard we'll say it BD'ed

 

With the release of Ivy Bridge Intel should release some new chipsets, leading to new motherboards being released as well, right?

Edited December 8, 2011 by NikoDG

[Waco]

Why does everyone think that 3D transistors are magical or something? Yes, they'll help efficiency but they aren't inherently faster or anything like that.

[d6bmg]

 

When IB overclocks, we'll see some high 5.5Ghz+ frequencies as well as reaching 6GHz

 

I also think so. Overclocking will be fun in IB CPUs. But we will have to wait for their release to 'see' how the perform in real-world overclocking.

And IB-E? It's too far to think about.