It’s been a surprisingly long time since Intel launched a new ultra-high-end processor. Intel’s 32nm die shrink of its original Nehalem processor, codenamed Westmere, debuted nearly two years ago. The Sandy Bridge architecture refreshed Intel’s desktop and mobile product segments early in 2011, but the top shelf consumer platform has only received incremental speed bumps — until now. The company’s new hexa-core processors incorporate all of the features of Sandy Bridge, including AVX support, and pairs it with an expanded memory controller and a monster of a new chipset.

Below is Intel’s new Sandy Bridge-E, in the silicate flesh. Note the two unmarked bits of silicon that just happen to be exactly the same size and shape as all the other cores. It’s not clear, at this point, if Intel is disabling these cores to improve yields or if it plans to offer an eight-core SBE processor at some point in the future — but this hexa-core chip is an eight-core part at heart.

The i7-3960X processor we’re testing today is the top-end flavor of three new parts Intel is launching in the Sandy Bridge-E family. The table below summarizes the new chips and compares them to Intel’s current Sandy Bridge lineup. Intel hasn’t formally announced a price for the Core i7-3820, but persistent rumors peg the chip’s eventual price as near that of the 2600/2600K. If so, the 3820 would be an extremely affordable workstation-class processor for a very high-end platform.

Platform Preview

We’ll cover the X79 chipset in more depth in a separate article, but the big-picture takeaway is that it’s a big step forward from the now-venerable X58 that debuted nearly three years ago with the launch of the original Nehalem. The two diagrams below present a high-level view of the numerous differences. (X58 immediately below).

And Intel’s X79:

The X58 chipset provided nearly as many PCI-Express lanes as the X79, but the PCI-Express controller was attached to the X58 IOH rather than integrated directly into the processor. This translates into higher PCI-E access latencies, and while it went unremarked at the time thanks to Nehalem’s vastly increased performance, it’s a speed bump the X79 chipset removes. The bandwidth between the CPU and southbridge has also been increased by a factor of ten compared to what X58 offered.

The X79’s quad-channel memory configuration is one of its headline features, but we don’t expect it to actually matter much in traditional desktop applications. The majority of desktop workloads, including games, tend to be latency sensitive rather than bandwidth limited. Scientific and high-end workstation apps that can take advantage of the additional bandwidth will be a different story, but such scenarios are few and far between.

The same is true for the X79’s enormous RAM capacity. The current crop of Core i7 Extreme chips top out at 24GB (Sandy Bridge supports a maximum of 32GB), but SB-E chips can drive up to 64GB of RAM. If you’re a rare user who can either use that much RAM now or could credibly do so in the future, the X79 could be an incredibly good deal. For the rest of us, 32GB is probably fine.

The Board

Intel sent us its own DX79SI reference board, which it claims will retail for between $280-$300.

As motherboards go, the DX79SI is a surprisingly understated beast. The PCB is dominated by the eight DIMM sockets rather than a flashy, giant heatsink. It’s a refreshing focus on function over form. We’ll be covering the board in a separate review, so we’ll leave things at that for now.