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Intel Sandy Bridge Extreme Core i7 3960X-EE |
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Written by Michael Schuette
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Nov 24, 2011 at 08:02 AM |
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Page 1 of 18
It used to be “War is the father of all things” and even if this is not a point of view that I personally subscribe to, the same motto still applies in a modified version, specifically: “competition fosters progress”. Of course, this begs the question what the father of all things is or even how to define progress. Merriam-Webster defines progress as:
a (1) : a royal journey marked by pomp and pageant
(2) : a state procession
b : a tour or circuit made by an official (as a judge)
c (1): an expedition, journey, or march through a region
(2) : a forward or onward movement (as to an objective or to a goal) : ADVANCE
(3): gradual betterment; especially : the progressive development of humankind
Quite honestly, I didn’t know what terms M-W would return but there are a number of choices that well describe what we are going to cover today and we’ll leave it to our readers to pick the most appropriate one.
Regardless of what definition of progress is used to describe SandyBridge Extreme, it seems fair to say that if it hadn’t been for AMD’s Bulldozer as the latest secret weapon against the Intelfidels, the latest iteration of Intel’s desktop flagship would probably not have seen the light of the day. Sandy Bridge Extreme is finally an Extreme Edition that fully deserves the EE moniker in every respect, starting with the number of lands, the transistor count, the number of memory channels, the power density and, before we forget it, the performance. To make a short story even shorter, SNBe performance dwarfs everything we have ever seen. Attributes to the speed of this CPU range from abominable to ridiculous and scary but the same applies to the cooling requirements and power consumption. Or maybe not. Time to separate the facts from myth!
Some Tech Specs
| Processor | Core Clock | Cores / Threads | L3 Cache | Max
Turbo | Max
Multiplier | TDP | MSRP |
| Intel Core i7 3960X | 3.3GHz | 6 / 12 | 15MB | 3.9GHz | 57x | 130W | $990 |
| Intel Core i7 3930K | 3.2GHz | 6 / 12 | 12MB | 3.8GHz | 57x | 130W | $555 |
| Intel Core i7 3820 | 3.6GHz | 4 / 8 | 10MB | 3.9GHz | 43x | 130W | TBD |
| Intel Core i7 2700K | 3.5GHz | 4 / 8 | 8MB | 3.9GHz | 57x | 95W | $332 |
| Intel Core i7 2600K | 3.4GHz | 4 / 8 | 8MB | 3.8GHz | 57x | 95W | $317 |
| Intel Core i7 2600 | 3.4GHz | 4 / 8 | 8MB | 3.8GHz | 42x | 95W | $294 |
| Intel Core i5 2500K | 3.3GHz | 4 / 4 | 6MB | 3.7GHz | 57x | 95W | $216 |
| Intel Core i5 2500 | 3.3GHz | 4 / 4 | 6MB | 3.7GHz | 41x | 95W | $205 |
The Sandy Bridge Extreme Architecture
Below we show a dis shot labeled with the officially disclosed details and we further added a few details. In short, the entire die consists of ~ 2.27 billion transistors crammed into 435 mm2. Center piece of the die is the massive L3 cache that we assume to be 16 20 MB total with variable portions thereof disabled for the different product SKUs. The L3 weighs in at approximately 108 mm2 with a total of roughly 1.13 billion transistors (based on 6-T-SRAM cells). The L3 cache is flanked on both sides by four cores, each of which adds another 21.5 mm2 for a combined 190 mm2. Note that two of the cores are disabled to offset the consumer version from the future release of the 8 core 16 thread server edition. The queue, uncore and I/O portion of the die is at 87 mm2 roughly the size of a midsize sedan and even the memory controller serving no less than four channels throws in an addition al 66.6 mm2. Speaking of the devil, the cores, L1 and L2 caches are the same as those used in the original Sandy Bridge architecture.
To put things into perspective, we have listed some of the most current µProcessors and their vital data. If you thought Zambezi was large, then SNBe is no less than XXL.
| CPU | Transistor Count | Die Size | Manufacturing Process | Cores |
| AMD Zambezi | ~2B | 315mm2 | 32nm | 8 |
| AMD Thuban | 904M | 346mm2 | 45nm | 6 |
| AMD Deneb | 758M | 258mm2 | 45nm | 4 |
| AMD Regor | 235M | 117mm2 | 45nm | 2 |
| Intel Sandy Bridge E | 2.27B | 435mm2 | 32nm | 6* |
| Intel Gulftown | 1.17B | 240mm2 | 32nm | 6 |
| Intel Nehalem/Bloomfield | 731M | 263mm2 | 45nm | 4 |
| Intel Sandy Bridge (i7/i5) | 995M | 216mm2 | 32nm | 4 |
| ntel Lynnfield | 774M | 296mm2 | 45nm | 4 |
| Intel Clarkdale | 384M | 81mm2 | 32nm | 2 |
*as shown in the die call-out Sandy Bridge Extreme has in reality 8 cores, however, two of them are disabled in the desktop version.
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Last Updated ( Jan 13, 2012 at 11:38 AM )
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