Intel Core i7-3960X Sandy Bridge-E Processor Review

SiSoftware Sandra 2011 SP5

The Sisoft Sandra 2011 SP5 benchmark utility just came out a few weeks
ago and we have started to include it in our benchmarking. Sandra 2011 comes with
support for Virtualisation (Virtual PC/Server, Hyper-V, VMware) and
GPGPU (OpenCL, DirectX 11 DirectCompute), but today we will be using the
program to look at memory and CPU performance!

Results: The Intel Core i7-3960X is the first processor that uses quad-channel DDR3 memory and we were blown away by the bandwidth this platform has. Our Core i7-3960X running 1866MHz had 39.5GB/s of memory bandwidth. We tried running 1600MHz memory in it as well and hit 38GB/s, so this platform has gobs of bandwidth available for the processor.

The Sandra Processor Multi-Media benchmark has been a long time
favorite of ours to look at floating point performance on processors.

Results:
The Intel Core i7-3960X rules the roost when it comes to CPU performance in this benchmark that put all the cores to 98% load.

Cryptography has become an important part of our digital life: it
allows us to conduct safe transactions online, certify programs and
services, keep our data secure and much more. Sandra 2010c has a
dedicated benchmark built-in that measures cryptographic performance,
which is important on the new Intel 32nm processors like the Core i7
980X. It includes features like AES-NI!
Intel AES-NI is a new set of Single Instruction Multiple Data (SIMD)
instructions that are going to be introduced in the next generation of
Intel processors, as of 2009. These instructions enable fast and secure
data encryption and decryption, using the Advanced Encryption Standard
(AES), defined by FIPS Publication number 197. The architecture
introduces six instructions that offer full hardware support for AES.
Four of them support high performance data encryption and decryption,
and the other two instructions support the AES key expansion procedure.
Let’s take a look at how this feature impacts Cryptography performance.

Results: The processors with the AES-NI instruction set are very evident in this benchmark. The Intel Core i7-3960X obviously supports AES-NI instructions and it easily beats out all of the other processors.