Intel Core i7 4960X "Ivy Bridge-E" Is A Beauty On Linux

The Core i7 4960X Extreme Edition processor is Intel's new $1000+ CPU built atop their "Ivy Bridge" architecture and features six physical cores plus Hyper Threading. The i7-4960X is running at 3.6GHz with a 4.0GHz Turbo Frequency and is all around a super-fast processor. Under Linux, the performance is fantastic and it runs great on modern Linux distributions.

Specifically, the Intel Core i7 4960X "Ivy Bridge-E" features six physical cores, 12 threads, 3.6GHz clock frequency, 4.0 GHz Turbo Frequency, 15MB of Smart Cache, SSE 4.2 / AVX / AES extensions, and is built on a 22nm process with a 130 Watt TDP. This Extreme Edition CPU was released at the beginning of September with a $1059 USD price-tag. Fortunately, Intel recently sent over a review sample of the i7-4960X as our new ultra high-end test rig for Linux benchmarking.

The full review on the Core i7 4960X "Ivy Bridge-E" under Linux is forthcoming and should be published on Phoronix in the next week. The i7-4960X will be compared to a variety of other AMD and Intel CPUs while running Ubuntu 13.10. Today's article is just a teaser of the many performance benchmarks to come from this one thousand dollar chip.

Besides the i7 4960X EE product review, this new Intel CPU will be used in many other articles. As always, whenever we get in a new and exciting product at Phoronix, there's many articles looking at various aspects of it... You can look forward to new compiler benchmarks, kernel comparisons, power monitoring, and various other interesting articles using this Ivy Bridge Extreme CPU. It's part of my latest "go to" system whenever in need of running some very fast Linux benchmarks. In the two weeks or so I've been using it, it's been running fantastic but wait for the full review to find out more.

For those curious how this thousand dollar Intel Ivy Bridge processor is performing under Ubuntu, the benchmark results I've uploaded so far using the open-source Phoronix Test Suite platform with OpenBenchmarking.org includes:

Intel Core i7 4960X Ivy Bridge-E Ubuntu Linux - A wide-range of open-source computational tests... Run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1310043-SO-INTELCORE25 to see how your own Linux system performs against the i7-4960X.

Gallium3D LLVMpipe Benchmarks - As always, for kicks whenever receiving a new high-end CPU I always see what the Gallium3D LLVMpipe software rasterizer performance looks like. In this result file, the Mesa 9.2 LLVMpipe performance is compared to a Radeon HD 4870 on the AMD R600g Gallium3D driver.

Intel Core i7-4960 - Other benchmark results and information on this new CPU found on OpenBenchmarking.org.