The original quad-core SNB-E Core i7-3820 officially released: three disappointed

Intel has just officially released the third member of the Sandy Bridge-E family and is also the first quad-core model "Core i7-3820". Unlike the previous six-core Core i7-3960X/3930K shielded by eight cores, it uses a native quad-core design, but compared with the prevailing news, there are three places after the final release failed to be satisfactory.

However, although the number of transistors has decreased from 2.27 billion to 1.27 billion, the core area has also been reduced from 435 square millimeters to 294 square millimeters. However, because of the same FCLGA2011 package, the Core i7-3820 chip size is still 58.5×51.0 millimeters. It still looks quite large.

The Core i7-3820's original frequency is as high as 3.6 GHz, but this results in very small acceleration space, and Intel’s earlier announced maximum acceleration frequency was 3.9 GHz, which is now reduced to 3.8 GHz. It is not known whether it is a clerical error or power control considerations. And deliberately. Taking into account the thermal design power is still 130W high, it is also excusable.

In addition, the processor three-level cache capacity of 10MB, the core voltage range of 0.6-1.35V, memory supports maximum capacity of 32GB four-channel DDR3-1600, in addition to support for Hyper-Threading, VT-x virtualization, ASE-NI/AVX instructions Sets and so on, but the VT-d virtualization technology is listed as not supported, just like the Core i7-3960X/3830K in C1's original stepping. According to yesterday's news, Core i7-3820's current stepping is M0/M1, and it's a surprise that we didn't want to repair the defects of VT-d technology.

Finally there is the PCI-E bus problem. Intel once claimed that SNB-E natively supports PCI-E 3.0. The original X79 motherboard also provides support through updating the BIOS. However, the Core i7-3820 is still marked as PCI-E 2.0, with a maximum of 40 channels. In any case, this shows that Intel's first attempt at PCI-E 3.0 is not perfect and it is hard to be reassuring.

Core i7-3820 official price 294-305 US dollars (Â¥ 1850-1920), equivalent to Core i7-2600. At present, the Japanese Akihabara market has been on sale. The retail price is 24,480-27,460 yen, and the box is 24,980-28,800 yen, which is approximately 1980-2220 yuan and 2020-2330 yuan respectively.