“Every manufacturer, including Intel, claims that it’s still looking out for the small but elite group of power users. To say otherwise is blasphemous,” Chris Angelini reports for Tom’s Hardware. “But my early look at the enthusiast-oriented Ivy Bridge-E configuration (Intel Core i7-4960X) turned up a distinct lack of progress in this upcoming generation.”
“In the company’s defense, it’s simultaneously fighting higher-stakes battles on other fronts that require financial resources and engineering talent, which have to come from somewhere,” Angelini reports. “That’s not to explain away two successive desktop launches that left enthusiasts feeling a little underwhelmed, or to recommend that you buy a new system when your coming-up-on-three-year-old Sandy Bridge-based box is still plenty fast. Ivy Bridge and Haswell were both decidedly mobile-focused. So, in light of IDC’s forecast that that tablet shipments will outpace desktops and laptops combined by 2015, it’s really no wonder that Intel’s emphasis is on low power and new form factors.”
Angelini reports, “Rather than turning its next Mac Pro into a big dual-socket affair, Apple is capitalizing on the fact that Ivy Bridge-EP will ship in 12-core configurations, and it’s consolidating the platform into a 9.9-inch-tall cylinder with up to one Xeon E5-2697 V2 CPU. Regardless of whether you love or hate the “wastebasket” design, the system’s specs are very impressive for the volume of space it occupies… Apple is going to have them in its next-gen Mac Pro workstations, and it’ll be interesting to see how much a 12-core Xeon E5 adds to the small cylinder’s price tag. Given a number of motherboard vendors that added Xeon E5 support to their X79 platforms, you should be able to build your own 12-core workstation running Windows. But if you thought that $1000 for an Extreme Edition CPU was nuts, just wait till you hear what a Xeon E5-2697 V2 will run you.”
Tons more info and benchmarks the full article here.
[Thanks to MacDailyNews Reader “Wes Bascas” for the heads up.]
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