Intel i7 Ivy Bridge-E tested, 10% faster than Sandy Bridge-E

Intel's upcoming flagship processor has been benchmarked, revealing it will provide around a 10 percent performance improvement over current generation products.

This may sound like a fairly modest improvement but it is about on the money compared to previous upgrade cycles.

Toppc, a member of Chinese overclocking forum Coolaler.com, performed the tests, pitting the upcoming Intel Core i7-4960X against the current cream of the crop, the Intel Core i7-3970X.

Toppc ran a comprehensive series of benchmarks, including SuperPi mod 1.6, CPU Mark '99, WPrime 1.63, Cinebench 11.5, 3DMark Vantage (CPU score), and 3DMark 06 (CPU score), with all showing between 5% and 10% performance improvement.

Discovered by TechReport, the post details the test equipment as consisting of an MSI X79A-GD45 Plus (with V17.1 BIOS) which uses the LGA2011 socket and Intel X79 Express chipset.

It is still possible that the results aren't genuine or that Intel has something else even more impressive up its sleeve, but for now it seems that if you're after a same-socket upgrade for your CPU, a 10% bump is all you'll get all other things being equal.

Scheduled to arrive in the second half of this year, the Ivy Bridge-E lineup is expected to boast up to 12 cores and 30MB of L3 cache, compared to the 8 cores and 20MB of Sandy Bridge E.