LGA 2011 Anandtech roadmap article

[matsta31]

Some info on pricing, timing, core numbers for X79 chipset. Not much, but still interesting :

Additional Details on Sandy Bridge-E Processors, X79, and LGA2011 - AnandTech :: Your Source for Hardware Analysis and News

[Sagath]

Intel makes no mention of pricing at this time, but the new chips should follow familiar patterns. The i7 Extreme will replace the current i7-990X and target the familiar $1000 price point. Moving down, the 3.2GHz hex-core replaces the current i7-980 (which is set to replace the i7-970 in the near future), taking over the $550~$600 range. At the bottom of the SNB-E lineup is the quad-core 3.6GHz chip, which will take over from the i7-960 as well as providing a competitor to the i7-2600 in the sub-$300 market.

+ Motherboard and Quad Channel ram = Pocketbook ouch.


Think I might skip this round and sit on my 920 till post SNB

[lastsplash]

Saving my pennies already.

[Charloz24]

Umm looking at the 3.2 Hex and it will be nearly the double in price VS 2600k for 2 extra core is not appealing for me. And will it overclock as high? Time will tell......

Saving for Ivy Bridge I think ;)

[chrisk]

Interesting.

One interesting piece of information is that the roadmaps make no mention of integrated graphics or Quick Sync, suggesting the platform will be for discrete graphics only. That makes perfect sense on one level, as users likely to upgrade to such high-end systems are almost sure to have discrete GPUs. On the other hand, Quick Sync has proven very effective for video transcoding, providing up to a four-fold increase over CPU-based encoding, so the loss of the feature is unfortunate.

Can I assume that these CPUs will rely mostly on AVX and good old clockspeed/bus (and other small refinements) to see transcoding performance increases? I loved the transcoding performance of 1155 chips, and hoped that 2011 would perform even better.

but this time the PCIe lanes come directly from the CPU instead of from the chipset, providing lower latency GPU access. There’s another extra, as the CPU (chipset) has the option to use four additional PCIe lanes from the PCH dedicated to storage bandwidth, presumably to help with performance on fast SATA 6Gbps devices (e.g. SSDs). Given the 2x16 PCIe lanes for graphics and quad-channel memory, we can account for most of the pinout increase relative to LGA1366 and LGA1155, and adding in these remaining storage PCIe lanes with a DMI link to the chipset should take care of the rest. Intel doesn't state whether they're using DMI or QPI, but DMI 2.0 only provides up to 20Gbps between the CPU and chipset, so supporting 10 SATA 6Gbps ports with fast SSDs would certainly saturate that.

On one hand I like the idea of having a direct link between the CPU and storage and graphics, but I wonder if this will make overclocking these even more challenging? (ie. lose Sata stability when overclocking).

[Sagath]

Originally Posted by chrisk

Interesting.


Can I assume that these CPUs will rely mostly on AVX and good old clockspeed/bus (and other small refinements) to see transcoding performance increases? I loved the transcoding performance of 1155 chips, and hoped that 2011 would perform even better.

The funny thing is that today Anand was talking about nVidias desktop Optimus technology, and how it will be utilized on Z68, which leads me to believe it will have an IGP, and I hope it does! (Although I'm still going to wait for Ivybridge I think...)

Originally Posted by chrisk

On one hand I like the idea of having a direct link between the CPU and storage and graphics, but I wonder if this will make overclocking these even more challenging? (ie. lose Sata stability when overclocking).

There was no issues with this and overclocking on SNB, so I doubt there will be with Z68. This is exactly why Intel wanted to lock the BCLK down (within 10% currently on SNB) so they didnt have to worry about these kinds of issues.