The Sandy Bridge Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 27, 2010 2:38 PM ESTAdobe Photoshop CS4 Performance
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
Right off the bat Sandy Bridge is killer. In our Photoshop test it’s faster than its closest quad-core price competitor, faster than its identically clocked Lynnfield, faster than AMD’s fastest and loses out only to Intel’s $999 Core i7 980X. That being said, it only takes about 9% longer to complete our benchmark than the 980X.
DivX 6.5.3 with Xmpeg 5.0.3
Our DivX test is the same DivX / XMpeg 5.03 test we've run for the past few years now, the 1080p source file is encoded using the unconstrained DivX profile, quality/performance is set balanced at 5 and enhanced multithreading is enabled:
While not the most stressful encoding test, it’s still a valid measure of performance and once again, Sandy Bridge is faster than all. In this case we’re faster than the Core i5 760 (~16%) and just behind the Core i7 880. Clock for clock there's not a huge improvement in performance here (HT doesn't seem to do much), it's just a better value than the 760 assuming prices remain the same.
x264 HD Video Encoding Performance
Graysky's x264 HD test uses the publicly available x264 encoder to transcode a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.
Lightly threaded performance is much improved - the 2400 is 14.6% faster than the Core i7 880.
The actual encoding pass favors more threads, so we see a big improvement over the 760 (19%) but it falls short of the Core i7 880. Turn HT on and we get a 12.6% improvement over an identically clocked/configured Lynnfield.
Note that CPU based video encoding performance may not matter if Intel implemented a good video transcode engine in Sandy Bridge.
Windows Media Encoder 9 x64 Advanced Profile
In order to be codec agnostic we've got a Windows Media Encoder benchmark looking at the same sort of thing we've been doing in the DivX and x264 tests, but using WME instead.
Performance in WME rarely scales anymore. Our benchmark doesn’t scale well beyond 4 cores and the only hope for performance are increases in clock speed or IPC. Sandy Bridge delivers the latter.
A 20% increase in performance vs. the similarly clocked 880 in a test that doesn’t scale with anything but IPC tells you a lot. Compared to the Core i5 760, Sandy Bridge is 26% faster.
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Mithan - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
I will be buying one of these the day it comes out.The only question will be between whether I get a CoreI5 or the Corei7. It will depend on price I guess, as the max I am willing to spend on a i7 CPU is $250.
Anyways, should be a nice upgrade to my E8400.
starfalcon - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
Considering how great of a quad core the Core i5-750 is at $195, hopefully they'll have some great quad cores at about $200.Sabresiberian - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
I've often wondered why people don't use WoW to test their video performance in the computers they are testing, and the obvious occurred to me - it so much depends on where you are and what the population is in the area you are in, that the frame rates vary widely. I imagine the frame rates reported here were for an area like Durotar with no one else in sight, heh. It would be a good place in terms of consistency, anyway, though less taxing that somewhere in Storm Peaks.WoW is often described as a CPU-intensive game, and so a great game to be included in tests of CPUs like you are doing here. Thanks for including it! I hope it is used for more video card tests as well; WoW may not be the most taxing test bed at lower end video, but at upper end in some areas it can hit 4 GHz i7 based Crossfired systems hard. I like playing at 85 Hz everywhere in the WoW universe I go - and Cataclysm will bring new video challenges, I'm sure.
drunkenrobot - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
I'm a bit disappointed at Intel's attempt to completely lock us out of over clocking all together. But maybe this is AMD's chance to win back the enthusiast market. If AMD sold only unlocked parts, they would have a market segment all to themselves...theangryintern - Wednesday, September 1, 2010 - link
OK, didn't see it in the article and don't really feel like wading through 200 comments. What I want to know is will we be able to either A) disable the onboard graphics if we have the latest and greatest bad-ass video card...or even better, B) Will it be able to run both at the same time in a configuration where when I'm doing just generic web surfing, emailing, etc, the Intel GPU is doing the work and the discrete card can power down (quieter and less heat generated), and then when I fire up a game, the discrete powers up and the onboard powers down?JonnyDough - Thursday, September 2, 2010 - link
Intel is screwing over minorities! Colorblind people unite!"Both H67 and P67 support 6Gbps SATA, however only on two ports. The remaining 4 SATA ports are 3Gbps. Motherboard manufacturers will color the 6Gbps ports differently to differentiate."
JonnyDough - Thursday, September 2, 2010 - link
Higher performance integrated GPU's should help bring some of the gaming market back to the PC. That is a very good thing. :)starx5 - Tuesday, September 7, 2010 - link
I'm sorry anand but is this because your intel frendly?Come on..you have to run high resolution(2560x1600 or higher eyefinity) gaming benchmark too.
Sandbridge is nothing if it doesnt have much supiror performance in high resolution gamming.
But I know intel sucks. Even 980X is sometimes sucks in high resolution gaming.
When I see your bench, I can clearly SEE your intel frendly. Espesilly in gaming part.
Anand, of course your site is very popular(even in my country korea).
But in reality..your nothing but a intel suckass indian.
wut - Friday, September 10, 2010 - link
Stop. You're making yourself look like a bigoted fool.mekdonel - Friday, November 5, 2010 - link
Naaah, you're not a Korean. Only Americans make dumb spelling mistakes like "your" in place of "you're".