The Intel Core i7 860 Review

by Anand Lal Shimpi on September 18, 2009 12:00 AM EST

3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax CPU Rendering Test

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:

3dsmax 9 - SPECapc 3dsmax 8 CPU Test

There are definitely cases where Bloomfield's memory controller is a boon, the Core i7 860 is able to approach but not outperform the i7 920.

Cinebench R10

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.

Cinebench R10 - Single Threaded Benchmark

Since threaded performance is excellent on the 860, after all it's running at 3.46GHz in this situation. The 920 doesn't stand a chance.

Cinebench R10 - Multi Threaded Benchmark

Up the thread count and we see the Core i7 860 slightly ahead of the 920.

Blender 2.48a

Blender is an open source 3D modeling application. Our benchmark here simply times how long it takes to render a character that comes with the application.

Blender 2.48a Character Render

Blender performance is again faster than a 920 and nearly on par with the Core i7 870.

POV-Ray 3.73 beta 23 Ray Tracing Performance

POV-Ray is a popular, open-source raytracing application that also doubles as a great tool to measure CPU floating point performance.

I ran the SMP benchmark in beta 23 of POV-Ray 3.73. The numbers reported are the final score in pixels per second.

POV-Ray 3.7 beta 23 - SMP Test

POV-Ray performance is nearly on par with the Core i7 870 and equal to that of the i7 920.

Video Encoding Performance Archiving, Excel Monte Carlo, Blu-ray & FLV Creation Performance
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  • iwodo - Sunday, September 20, 2009 - link

    Well, it will defiantly sell well in terms of OEM market. Since they will sell the same amount of PC, and Intel will be pushing Lynfield into their throat anyway.

    I wont even called that Sales, it is more like tax on those OEM makers.

    I think it wont sell well in terms of Retail market.
  • IntelUser2000 - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    Ivy Bridge is a shrink of Sandy Bridge to 22nm. It's Haswell that will have FMA.
  • iwodo - Sunday, September 20, 2009 - link

    Yes. It is Ivy Beidge ( the shrink of Sandy Bridge ) for FMA.
    It was supposed to be for Sandy Bridge, but some changes delay it to Ivy Bridge. So unless they have postponed it AGAIN. it should be out with Ivy Bridge.
  • bigboxes - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    I know the basic archetecture of Lynnfield is superior to Bloomfield, but you are not using 6gb of tri-channel memory for the i920. That is where the i920 really shines. Is there a reason that you are not testing with 6gb of ram with the 920 other than apples to apples testing that needs to be done? Just curious.
  • the zorro - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    lynnfield has another gigantic bottleneck which is the dmi bus speed of only 2GBps, phenom 2 hypertransport speed is 41.6 GB/s which means that is 20 times faster than lynnfield when communicating with the chipset,that shows why phenom 2 is better than lynnfield. this is going to be a real problem in the next future.
  • silverblue - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    Actually, as HT 3.0 is limited to 16-bit width on AMD desktop boards, it's half that.
  • DigitalFreak - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    Next future? As opposed to the current future? I must thank you for all the laughs I get from reading your posts.
  • TA152H - Saturday, September 19, 2009 - link

    No offense, but you're clearly an idiot.

    You realize that in EVERY benchmark, the i7 860 was running at higher clock speeds than the i7 920. Sometimes by a lot, with turbo mode. Also, Anand uses inferior memory for the i7 920, to try to 'prove' the validity of the brain-damaged P55 platform.

    Despite his bad attempt, the i7 920 STILL outperformed it. If you clock them at the same rate, with the same uncore, it's only ugly for the Lynnfield.

    It's not superior. Well, in performance. It's got nice power characteristics, and it's cheaper to implement. But, your remark is purely idiotic.

    Where do you get stuff like this from?
  • Etern205 - Sunday, September 20, 2009 - link

    Lynnfields are categorizes as mainstream, therefore no matter how advanced their architecture is compared to Bloomfield, it won't out perform it. Intel purposely did this and you should know this by now, but I guess you don't care as your too busy sucking your own c0ck.


    "Your the kind of man that can be use as a blueprint to build a idiot".

  • bigboxes - Sunday, September 20, 2009 - link

    Sorry. I didn't mean to say anything that would warrant an "idiot" label. I have just been reading from Anand that the Lynnfield core is better than the Bloomfield. In all his testing he never uses 6gb of ram in his tests. I understand that he wants to measure the cpus on a level playing field, but when you put 6gb of pc1600 ram on an i920 those scores increase considerably. From what I understand that is something that the Lynnfield cannot achieve. Was just wondering if Anand could throw that (i920 w/6gb) into his charts. It seems that almost all Bloomfield owners are gonna be running 6gb (3x 2gb) and not 4gb. The i920 uses that extra bandwidth and it truly performs better when so equipped. I hope that makes more sense.

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