The Ivy Bridge Preview: Core i7 3770K Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 6, 2012 8:16 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core i7
- Ivy Bridge
Content Creation Performance
Adobe Photoshop CS4
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.
Our Photoshop test is well threaded but it doesn't peg all cores constantly. Instead you get burstier behavior. With the core count advantage out of the way, SNB-E steps aside and allows the 3770K to step up as the fastest CPU we've tested here. The performance advantage over the 2600K is around 9%.
3dsmax 9
Today's desktop processors are more than fast enough to do professional level 3D rendering at home. To look at performance under 3dsmax we ran the SPECapc 3dsmax 8 benchmark (only the CPU rendering tests) under 3dsmax 9 SP1. The results reported are the rendering composite scores.
In another FP heavy workload we see a pretty reasonable gain for Ivy Bridge: 8.5% over a 2600K. This isn't enough to make you want to abandon your Sandy Bridge, but it's a good step forward for a tick.
Cinebench 11.5
Created by the Cinema 4D folks we have Cinebench, a popular 3D rendering benchmark that gives us both single and multi-threaded 3D rendering results.
The single threaded Cinebench test shows a 9% performance advantage for the 3770K over the 2600K. The gap increases slightly to 11% as we look at the multithreaded results:
If you're running a workload that can really stress multiple cores, the 6-core Sandy Bridge E parts will remain unstoppable but in the quad-core world, Ivy Bridge leads the pack.
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rpsgc - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
All that revenue, all that profit and yet, they STILL can't bet AMD in integrated graphics.I think that qualifies as a fail.
Thanks for (kind of) proving his point?
dagamer34 - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
They don't really care to. The point of a business is to make money, not have the best products. The latter only gets solved when AMD gets serious in competing with Intel on power/performance again.Operandi - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
The internet called,"stop wasting my bits".StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
You know what? All you do is bash AMD.If you think AMD sucks THAT much and it's engineers and everything else is incredibly bad...
Then I have a challenge.
Go build your own Processor or GTFO with the bashing.
bennyg - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Do not feed the troll.StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Except... Intels IGP drivers on Windows are bad already. They are allot worst on the Mac.Historically Intel has never supported it's IGP's to *any* great length and even had to throw up a compatibility list for it's IGP's so you know what games they could potentially run.
Here is a good example:
http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/intelhdgraph...
Heck I recall it taking Intel a good 12 months just to enable TnL and Shader Model 3 on the x3100 chips.
Historically the support has just not been there.
earthrace57 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
AMD's CPUs are going to die...sucks to be an AMD fanboy. However, whatever they are doing with their dedicated GPUs, they are doing something right...if they can manage to pull their act together on the driver side, I think AMD would live as a GPU company...earthrace57 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
I'm sorry, but Llano APUs will stay on top for quite a while; Intel is still at heart a CPU, Llano is part GPU...if AMD can get drivers the quality of nVidias, they will most likely do extremely well on that front.zshift - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
I really enjoyed the added compilation benchmark. This site has the most comprehensive collection of benchmarks that I've seen, it's a one-stop shop for most of my reviews. Keep up the great work!Jamahl - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link
Would be great to see power benchmarks of the IGP, especially vs Llano and the HD 3000. Let's see if the graphics improvements have come at the price of yet more power consumption or if intel has managed to keep that down.