Upgrade time! LGA2011 FTW #2

Progress in CPUs was getting slower in recent years due to lack of competition from AMD (until recently). 5 years ago I moved to LGA2011 with i7-3820 (4 cores, 32nm), not waiting for Ivy Bridge. Recently ebay got filled with lots of used server CPUs on LGA2011 which were compatible with my motherboard. That was extremely tempting and much more interesting than upgrading to yet another boring quad core system.

I went for E5-2695v2 - 12 cores, 30Mb of L3 cache, 22nm (Ivy Bridge). That is one of the largest commercial dies - enormous 492 mm².
This all currently costs mere 295$ (just 4 years ago Intel was charging whopping $2336 for that).


Task manager looks beautiful now:


Quick benchmark results: Surely, both old and new processors are overclocked. For E5-2695v2 overclocking is really limited by multiplier and BCLK. Stability is rock solid - I was even able to reduce core voltage quite a bit so temperatures under full load are unbelievably low for 12-core CPU (<50°C).

	i7-3820 @4.3Ghz	E5-2695v2@2.926Ghz HT On	E5-2695v2@2.926Ghz HT Off
x264 ffmpeg, FPS	53	113	88
Linx, GFLOPs	95	197.42	201.2

Typically, on parallelized tasks it's >2 times faster. With this amount of cores it is no longer possible to ignore multicore support in all applications I use. I even had to upgrade some of my image processing scripts using mparallel.

Now I can work in peace until we'll get some dual-socket systems with 16-32 core CPUs and HBMs...