Intel i7 3820 released, spiritual successor to i7 920; Ivy Bridge delayed until June

The Lord giveth and the Lord hath taken away: Intel has quietly released the Sandy Bridge-E Core i7 3820, a quad-core, mid-range, socket LGA2011 part that’s the spiritual successor to the i7 920 and 930 — but according to a report from Digitimes, mass roll out of Ivy Bridge has been postponed until summer.

The Core i7 3820 is the first sub-$500 chip to be released for the LGA2011 socket, the same socket used by Core i7 Extreme 3980X and 3860X, the i7 3930K, and the Xeon E5 server processors. Compared to its 6- and 8-core compatriots, the 3820 is “only” a quad-core, but it retains the same on-die 4x 64-bit DDR3 controller, 40 PCIe v3 channels, and dual-link QPI. There’s 10MB of L3 cache, too, and the base clock rate is 3.6GHz. The price? A miraculous $285. Yet again, it doesn’t look good for AMD’s top-of-the-line FX-8150, which is priced around the same point and yet significantly slower than Intel’s offerings. read more...