The Sandy Bridge Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 27, 2010 2:38 PM ESTFinal Words
If Intel's roadmap and pricing hold true, then the Core i5 2400 should give you an average of 23% better performance than the Core i5 760 at a potentially lower point. If we compare shipping configurations, the Core i5 2400 should actually perform like a Core i7 880 despite not having Hyper Threading enabled. Clock for clock however, Sandy Bridge seems to offer a 10% increase in performance. Keep in mind that this analysis was done without a functional turbo mode, so the shipping Sandy Bridge CPUs should be even quicker. I'd estimate you can add another 3 - 7% to these numbers for the final chips. That's not bad at all for what amounts to a free upgrade compared to what you'd buy today. Power consumption will also see an improvement. Not only will Sandy Bridge be noticeably quicker than Lynnfield, it'll draw less power.
While Nehalem was an easy sell if you had highly threaded workloads, Sandy Bridge looks to improve performance across the board regardless of thread count. It's a key differentiator that should make Sandy Bridge an attractive upgrade to more people.
The overclocking prevention Intel is putting into Sandy Bridge sounds pretty bad at first. However if the roadmap and pricing stay their course, it looks like overclockers looking to spend as much as they did on Core i5 750/760s won't be limited at all thanks to the K SKUs in the mix. The real question is what happens at the low end. While I don't get the impression that the Core i3 2000 series will be completely locked, it's unclear how much rope Intel will give us.
Sandy Bridge's integrated graphics is good. It's fast enough to put all previous attempts at integrated graphics to shame and compete with entry level discrete GPUs. The fact that you can get Radeon HD 5450 performance for free with a Core i5 2400 is just awesome. As I mentioned before, you won't want to throw away your GTX 460, but if you were planning on spending $50 on a GPU - you may not need to with Sandy Bridge.
Assuming mobile Sandy Bridge performs at least as well as the desktop parts, we may finally be at the point where what you get with a mainstream notebook is good enough to actually play some games. I'm really curious to see how well the higher spec integrated graphics parts do once Sandy Bridge makes it a little closer to final (Update: it looks like we may have had a 12 EU part from the start). I should add that despite the GPU performance improvement - don't believe this is enough. I would like to see another doubling in integrated GPU performance before I'm really happy, but now it's very clear that Intel is taking integrated graphics seriously.
Architecturally, I'm very curious to see what Intel has done with Sandy Bridge. Given the improvements in FP performance and what I've heard about general purpose performance, I'm thinking there's a lot more than we've seen here today. Then there are the features that we were unable to test: Sandy Bridge's improved turbo and its alleged on-die video transcode engine. If the latter is as capable as I've heard, you may be able to have better transcoding performance on your notebook than you do on your desktop today. Update: Check out our Sandy Bridge Architecture article for full details on the CPU's architecture.
With Sandy Bridge next year you'll get higher clock speeds, more performance per clock and reasonable integrated graphics at presumably the same prices we're paying today. What's even more exciting is the fact that what we're looking at is just mainstream performance. The high end Sandy Bridge parts don't arrive until the second half of 2011 which add more cores and more memory bandwidth.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
200 Comments
View All Comments
tatertot - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Can you also confirm whether or not the GPU turbo was also disabled?DanNeely - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Do you think Intel will be sharing preliminary performance/pricing data on LGA 2011 by the time that the first LGA 1155 parts start shipping? I'm on 1366 now and would like to know if staying on the high end platform will be a reasonable option or if there isn't any point in holding off for another 6 months on my upgrade.Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
I wouldn't expect any near-final LGA-2011 performance data until Q2 next year, well after the LGA-1155 launch.Take care,
Anand
Casper42 - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
2 things jumped out at me1) No USB3 - Major FAIL. Putting USB3 in an Intel chipset will drive huge adoption rates rather than this limping in BS by manufacturers today. Not to mention that for Hard Drives, USB2 has been a bottleneck for a long time whereas only top end SSDs today are maxing out SATA3
2) 2 chips with Quad Core and no HT that are identical except for Clock speed and one of them is essentially the 400 and the other is the 500? WTF? Call them the 2410, 2420, 2430, etc. That gives you like 8 or 9 speed bins for that family. Whomever is doing the numbering at Intel needs a swift kick to the head to get them back on track mentally as things just get more and more confusing. You have the i3/i5/i7 today, why not just change it to:
i2 = Dual Core no HT/Turbo
i3 = Dual Core with HT and/or Turbo
i4 = Quad Core no HT/Turbo
i5 = Quad WITH
i6 = Six without
etc
As it stands now we have i5 with both dual and quad core and i7 with 4 and 6. just doesnt make sense.
dertechie - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
That's quite the IPC improvement there. Not quite Netburst to Core 2 but a lot more than I expected (I was expecting something on the order of 5%, with most gains coming from ramping clocks with the extra headroom of 32nm).Question is, do I want the i5-2500K more than I loathe Intel's motherboard department? I'm seeing them bring out new sockets almost as often as new processor families, which really, really does not make me confident in the socket's future.
I will wait at least for Bulldozer benches before buying whatever makes sense at that time (okay, probably weighted in AMD's favor). I've lasted 4 years on this Pentium D, I can live another half of one.
IntelUser2000 - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Why do some people still compare Netburst vs. Core 2? The Pentium 4 generation was a clock speed focused that that FAILED to realize its clock speed potential so it looked really bad compared to Core 2.Compared to Core Duo Core 2 was only 15-20% faster. Sandy Bridge manages to do another 20%, which is really good in a generation, yea?
ssj4Gogeta - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Pentium D to SB will be such a huuuuge jump, lol.neslog - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Your excellent article was exciting to read. Thank you!I noticed a small typo on the Windows 7 Gaming Performance page in the first line under the Data Recovery chart : "Clock for clock...to the i7{5} 760..."
ET - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
I think that the integrated graphics here are a game changer. Sure nobody will look to them for serious gaming, but finally they're at a point where if you buy any CPU you will be able to play most games, even if at low settings. I'll be looking forward especially to the mobile CPU's. With Bobcat around the corner, I guess next year we will finally see mainstreams notebooks become capable of some game playing, which will be great (and bad for NVIDIA).Exodite - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
What I'd like to see is something like Nvidia's Optimus make it to the desktop. With both AMD and Intel going for on-chip integrated graphics the market is practically begging for a unified standard for graphics switching.The next-generation IGPs look to be competent enough for anything but high-end gaming, which means I should be able to power down my discrete graphics card completely most of the time. The end result would be significant reductions in noise generation, power usage and heat emissions.
Having discreet graphics cards reduced to basically connector-less, slot-in cards for on-demand co-processing seems the logical step.