In a somewhat expected announcement, Intel officially released its Core i7 2700K CPU today. Based on the current Sandy Bridge architecture, the quad-core chip is clocked at 3.5GHz with a Turbo Boost of 3.9GHz. This means it's 100MHz faster than the 2600K - a chip that's been out for a while already.
Our benchmarks have shown the 2600K bests most of the hex and octo-core CPUs in applications that aren't heavily multithreaded. However, when it comes to crunch time on heavily parallel tasks such as encryption, compression and multithreaded benchmarking programs such as wPrime, AMD's FX-8150 octo-core Bulldozer just comes out on top.
With the 2700K, Intel should be able to close this multithreaded performance gap, firmly putting the Bulldozer cores on the back foot. Priced on Scan.co.uk at £287 retail, Intel’s Core i7 2700K is 45 per cent dearer than the AMD’s FX-8150, retailing at £198.97. Even with the expected increase in benchmark results, this is a significant price gap, though as we have reported previously, those looking to overclock have a lot of wiggle room with the quad-core i7s; the ‘K’ in the product name indicates an unlocked multiplier, and the 2700K manages to stay within the 95W TDP.
Intel has seemingly managed to stop AMD’s Bulldozer in its tracks, but for those not looking to overclock, the FX-8150 would still make a good budget buy for some.
