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.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
200 Comments
View All Comments
teohhanhui - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Just something like nVidia Optimus? Perhaps Intel could come up with a more elegant solution to the same problem...hnzw rui - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Hmm, based on the roadmap I actually think the i7-2600K will be priced close to the i7-875K. The i7-950 is supposed to drop to $294 next week putting it in the high end Mainstream price range (it'll still be Q3'10 then). Also, all the $500+ processors are in the Performance category (i7-970, $885; i7-960, $562; i7-880, $562).If the i7-2600K goes for $340 or thereabouts, I can already see supply shortages due to high demand (and the eventual price gouging that would follow).
liyunjiu - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
How are the comparisons between NVIDIA low end discrete/mobile graphics?tatertot - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Hey Anand,How could you tell that this sample had only 6 execution units active in the GPU vs. the full 12?
Was it just what this particular SKU is supposed to have, or some CPU-Z type info, or... ?
thx
Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Right now all desktop parts have 6 EUs, all mobile parts have 12 EUs. There are no exceptions on the mobile side, there may be exceptions on the desktop side but from the information I have (and the performance I saw) this wasn't one of those exceptions.Take care,
Anand
steddy - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
"all mobile parts have 12 EUs"Sweet! Guess the good 'ol GeForce 310m is on the way out.
mianmian - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
The mobile CPU/GPU usually has much lower frequency.I guess the 12EU mobile GPU will perform on pair with the desktop 6EU one.
IntelUser2000 - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
That seriously doesn't make sense. Couple of possible scenarios then.-Performance isn't EU bound and 2x EUs only bring 10-20%
-The mobile parts are FAR faster than desktop parts(unlikely)
-The mobile parts do have 12 EUs, but are clocked low enough to perform like the 6 EU desktop(but why?)
-There will be specialized versions like the i5 661
DanNeely - Sunday, August 29, 2010 - link
Actually I think it does. Regardless of if they 6 or 12EU's it's still not going be a replacement for any but the bottom tier of GPUs. However adding a budget GPU to a desktop system has a fairly minimal opportunity cost since you're just sticking a card into a slot.Adding a replacement GPU in a laptop has a much higher opportunity cost. You're paying in board-space and internal volume even if power gating, etc minimizes the extra power draw doubling the size of the on die GPU will cost less than adding an external GPU that's twice as fast. You also can't upgrade a laptop GPU later on if you decide you need more power.
Anand Lal Shimpi - Tuesday, August 31, 2010 - link
I spoke too soon, it looks like this may have been a 12 EU part. I've updated the article and will post an update as soon as I'm able to confirm it :)Take care,
Anand