Although we are still far away from the launch of Intel's 4th generation Core i7 Extreme CPUs scheduled to appear sometimes in September, TomsHardware.com managed to get their hands on an engineering sample of the Core i7-4960X LGA2011 CPU and run some benchmarks to compare it to Intel's previous generation as well as some current generation AMD CPUs.

In case you missed it before, Intel's Ivy Bridge-E Core i7 Extreme lineup will consist of three models, the Core i7-4820K, Core i7-4930K and the Core i7-4960X. All three parts will have the same 130W TDP, fit into LGA 2011 socket and X79 chipset, have support for DDR3-1866 memory and feature official support for PCI-Express 3.0.

The flagship Core i7-4960X, that Tomshardware.com managed to get, has six cores, supports Hyper Threading, has 15MB of L3 cache and works at 3.6GHz base and 4GHz Turbo clock. According to earlier details, the new Core i7-4960X should end to be around 5 to 10 percent faster than the previous Core i7-3970X flagship but also offer quite a better energy-efficiency despite its same 130W TDP.

The most performance gains can be seen in multi-threaded synthetic tests, while in single-threaded ones even the US $350 Core i7-4770K is breathing down its neck. As noted, the good part of it is the significantly higher energy-efficiency despite the same 130W TDP. Of course, thise does not come as a big support considering that it is made on 22nm manufacturing process which is expectedly much better than the 32nm used with the Core i7-3970X flagship.





Source: Tomshardware.com.