The Sandy Bridge Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 27, 2010 2:38 PM ESTPAR2 Multithreaded Archive Recovery Performance
Par2 is an application used for reconstructing downloaded archives. It can generate parity data from a given archive and later use it to recover the archive
Chuchusoft took the source code of par2cmdline 0.4 and parallelized it using Intel’s Threading Building Blocks 2.1. The result is a version of par2cmdline that can spawn multiple threads to repair par2 archives. For this test we took a 708MB archive, corrupted nearly 60MB of it, and used the multithreaded par2cmdline to recover it. The scores reported are the repair and recover time in seconds.
Clock for clock there's very little advantage compared to Lynnfield, but compared to the i7 760 the Sandy Bridge advantage is no less than 35%.
WinRAR - Archive Creation
Our WinRAR test simply takes 300MB of files and compresses them into a single RAR archive using the application's default settings. We're not doing anything exotic here, just looking at the impact of CPU performance on creating an archive:
Without Hyper Threading, the Core i5 2400 equals the performance of the Core i7 880. Turn HT on, and this Sandy Bridge part that may end up costing ~$200 is nearly as fast as the $999 Core i7 980X.
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AndreC - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Hi there.. I`m currently a freelance 3D generalist.. and I was going to upgrade my old Core 2 Quad QX6700 with a Core i7 980X. But now i`m not that confident. Sandy bridge looks amazing, I was sad seeing the new socket for sandy bridge, it does not compell me to buy a new motherboard now... does anyone know if the 1366 socket will stick with the nex gen High end market? I dont want to shoot myself in the foot here.AndreC - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Sorry dind`t read the last frase...Great Review btw. cheers
sdsdv10 - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
As noted in the Intel roadmap in the article, for at least part of 2011 they will be sticking with 1366 for the release of the Core i7 990X (to replace the 980X). However, after that the Intel performance platform will switch over to socket LGA-2011. Here is a quote from the articlea (page 3)."Original Nehalem and Gulftown owners have their own socket replacement to look forward to. In the second half of 2011 Intel will replace LGA-1366 with LGA-2011. LGA-2011 adds support for four DDR3 memory channels and the first 6+ core Sandy Bridge processors."
AndreC - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Yeah.. as I said "Sorry dind`t read the last frase..." but thx anyway..It`s a shame to be always changing sockets, but probabily a necessity to evolve the technology.
Kaihekoa - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Having the first chips target the mainstream market is a very smart move by Intel because that's where AMD makes it's money. I'm honestly not impressed by the performance numbers, but I am impressed by the overall performance, power consumption, and pricepoints for these next gen CPUs. What I'm really looking forward to is the performance segment of Sandy Bridge.mino - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Intel's mainstream is not where AMD's is.Especially in 2011.
Ontario:
. . . CPU - above Atom, under everything else
. . . GPU - 5450/Sandy class
Lliano:
. . . CPU - 2C Sandy class
. . . GPU - 5650 class (at least 3x Sandy)
Bulldozer Desktop(8C):
. . . CPU - 4C Sandy Class
. . . GPU - discrete 5750+ class
So basically AMD's platform in the Intel's "mainstream" $200+ class will be a Bulldozer with discrete GPU. Aka AMD's high end stuff.
silverblue - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Not sure I agree with that. From AMD's own figures, Bulldozer is significantly faster than STARS. It would be more realistic to expect Bulldozer to perform closely to Sandy Bridge, however we really need more benchmarks before we get a true idea. Bulldozer looks great on paper, but that's virtually all we have so far.In any case, you compared Bulldozer to "4C Sandy Class", which would be an 8-thread Sandy Bridge, and thus - at least relatively - high end. And I'm not getting into the core/module argument again... ;)
mino - Sunday, August 29, 2010 - link
What I wanted to point out is that Intel sees the 4C Sandy as a "mainstream" part.Reason being they are moving HUGE amounts (compared to AMD) of $150-$250 parts.
On the other hand, AMD sees the mainstream at $100-$200 and that is a Llano market.
For AMD, Zambezi is high-end that justifies discrete GPU.
And Yes, Bulldozer 8C should compare with 4C Sandy favorably, (it would mostly go to pricing).
tatertot - Sunday, August 29, 2010 - link
BD 8C is going to be up against 8C and 6C Sandy on LGA-2011 in the client space.mino - Monday, August 30, 2010 - link
am sure AMD WOULD like it that way. But no. Not really.8C Bulldozer versus 6C Sandy might actually be competitive.
However 32nm SOI is a new process so we might as well forget about 4GHz parts for now.
Also, Sandy 6C is Q4 part and 8C is most probably 2012 part.