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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tech6 - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
More speed with less power - it looks like a very competitive product. I really hope that AMD has something up their sleeve with Bulldozer and Bobcat to compete with Sandy Bridge.killless - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
17% higher performance is just not exciting.You need to give me 50% improvement at least to make me want to spend $1000 for new CPU/Motherboard/memory.
It really hasn't been all that exciting since Core 2 Quad...
tatertot - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
I take it turbo was also disabled on the rest of the parts used to compare, right?Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Turbo was enabled on everything else - SB performance should be higher for final parts.Take care,
Anand
tatertot - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Oh!Well that puts the IPC gains of Sandy over Westmere at something like 20% then, considering the 880 turbos up to 3.73GHz on single-threaded work.
That's pretty impressive.
Drag0nFire - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
I just want to say first of all, this totally made my Friday! I love previews of upcoming architectures!Any news on the roadmap for the mobile variant of Sandy Bridge? Or do I have to wait til IDF?
Jamahl - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
What system was this benchmarked on Anand?Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Clarkdale - those charts were actually pulled from here, just with the SB numbers added:http://www.anandtech.com/show/2952/2
We didn't have the system for long enough to rerun the tests with the 5450 on the H67 board. The 5450 is GPU bound at those resolutions/settings however:
http://images.anandtech.com/graphs/5450_0203102236...
Those numbers were generated with a Core i7 920.
Take care,
Anand
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
I just ran a sanity check on the Core i7 880 with the 5450, the numbers don't move by more than the normal test margins - the 5450 is totally GPU bound here.Take care,
Anand
ESetter - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Do you know if any of the benchmarks make use of AVX instructions? Sandy Bridge effectively doubles the maximum throughput for compute-intensive operations like SGEMM and DGEMM. While it might not translate to a 2x speedup in real-world applications, I imagine it should give a significant gain, at least in the HPC field.