Info on Sandy Bridge-E Pricing
by Kristian Vättö on August 15, 2011 1:46 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Sandy Bridge
VR-Zone has released preliminary info about Sandy Bridge-E pricing. There doesn't seem to be any surprises though; the report states that SB-E will adopt exactly the same price points as what Intel's current LGA 1366 socketed i7 CPUs use. Below is a table of the CPUs and their specs:
| Nehalem/Westmere | Sandy Bridge-E | |||||
| Model | i7-960 | i7-980 | i7-990X | i7-3820 | i7-3930K | i7-3960X |
| Cores/Thread Count | 4/8 | 6/12 | 6/12 | 4/8 | 6/12 | 6/12 |
| Frequency | 3.2GHz | 3.33GHz | 3.46GHz | 3.6GHz | 3.2GHz | 3.3GHz |
| Max Turbo | 3.46GHz | 3.6GHz | 3.73GHz | 3.9GHz | 3.8GHz | 3.9GHz |
| L3 Cache | 8MB | 12MB | 12MB | 10MB | 12MB | 15MB |
| Unlocked Multiplier | No | No | Yes | No | Yes | Yes |
| Price | $294 | $583 | $999 | $294 | $583 |
$999 |
As the table shows, the price points are indentical. This is what we expected back in April in our article about SB-E, and Intel has kept pretty much the same price points since the introduction of Nehalem in late 2008. However, Intel will not be including CPU coolers in the retail package anymore, which marginally reduces their expenses. Considering that SB-E is mainly aimed at enthusiasts and the enterprise market, it makes sense as most users will rely on third party coolers anyway due to better cooling performance and/or quieter operation. Note that the CPU pricing does not imply that the platform costs will be identical to X58; it's possible that Intel will be charging more for the X79 chipset, but that shouldn't make a dramatical difference.
VR-Zone says that this info has come from one of their most reliable sources and overall VR-Zone has been a fairly reliable source of information lately, but as with any unofficial data, the info should be taken with grain of salt.
Source: VR-Zone
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DanNeely - Monday, August 15, 2011 - link
This chip seems mostly pointless unless it's a 6core part down binned due to core failures.Kristian Vättö - Monday, August 15, 2011 - link
You get the extra PCIe lanes and X79 goodness. That is probably its only real use, otherwise i7-2600K (or even i7-2500K) should be a better deal. Sure, the market is fairly limited but better than offering only +$500 CPUs IMO :-) Most likely it's a binned down version of the 6-cores though, doesn't make much sense to produce 6-core chips if there is only one model.Kristian Vättö - Monday, August 15, 2011 - link
Quad core models I meant. Damn we really need the edit button.fhaddad78 - Monday, August 15, 2011 - link
I've been wanting to upgrade for a while now, I'm liking the i7-3820. Anyone know what the diff is between the i7-3820 and i7-960. Seems like you are getting less for the same price. Unless that chip is for some other market.Kristian Vättö - Monday, August 15, 2011 - link
The micro-architecture is different (Nehalem vs Sandy Bridge). Clock for clock, SB seems to be around 20% faster. You also get X79 chipset which has some additional tweaks (SATA 6Gb/s and more SATAs).fhaddad78 - Monday, August 15, 2011 - link
Thank you! :)darkos - Monday, August 15, 2011 - link
I beleive you also get quad channel memory controller instead of the dual and tri that we have with the existing lga1155 and lga1366 parts. It will be interesting to see what performance improvement this yields over the existing situation.Taft12 - Monday, August 15, 2011 - link
Bold prediction: Somewhere between 0 and 1% on everything except for the Sandra Memory Bandwidth benchmark. No sale.(actually, G.Skill, Mushkin, Kingston et al will turn the quad-channel memory scam into PLENTY of DIMM sales!)
DanNeely - Monday, August 15, 2011 - link
Probably right. You normally* need 6 cores to start bottlenecking LGA1366's triple channel memory on a few real world apps. Quad channel gives room for 8 cores; although unless they're coming under the Xeon brand it doesn't look like we'll get any of them until Ivy Bridge reaches this socket.*One Einstein@Home tester found an IIRC 10% slowdown with 2 channels on quads but he was OCing the CPU to >3.6ghz and had the ram down around DDR3-1000. I'm not sure if he retested with ram at normal speeds; and the app in question has parts with highly random memory patterns that hammer the controller hard.
intel_is_so_gay - Monday, August 15, 2011 - link
There are rumours that there will be an 8-core i7-3980X.