Intel’s plans for the ultra high-end X79 platform are quite clear nowadays – with the arrival of Haswell in a month and a half the chip giant will retire the current Sandy Bridge-E generation and will introduce the Ivy Bridge-E CPUs. The first tests of the upcoming processors are now available thanks to the efforts of a Chinese enthusiast from the Coolaler.com forum and they show Ivy Bridge-E processors are on average just 7-8 per cent faster than their predecessors.
Of course the benchmark results cannot be called official but they give a pretty good idea as to what to expect. The hardware enthusiast has tested the upcoming Core i7-4960X Ivy Bridge-E processor against the Core i7-3970X Sandy Bridge-E chip. The test suite includes 3DMark06 CPU, 3DMark Vantage CPU, Cinebench 11.5, CPUMark 99, SuperPi and wPrime while the performance improvement ranges from 5.25 per cent in CPUMark 99 to 11.69 per cent in SuperPi 8M.
Ivy Bridge-E processors are expected in H2 2013 and can be used in LGA2011 motherboards.
Source: X-bit Labs