The Sandy Bridge Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 27, 2010 2:38 PM ESTWindows 7 Gaming Performance
Our Bench suite is getting a little long in the tooth, so I added a few more gaming tests under Windows 7 with a new group of processors. We'll be adding some of these tests to Bench in the future but the number of datapoints is obviously going to be small as we build up the results.
Batman is an Unreal Engine 3 game and a fairly well received one at that. Performance is measured using the built in benchmark at the highest image quality settings without AA enabled.
Gaming performance is competitive, but we don't see any huge improvements under Batman.
Dragon Age Origins is another very well received game. The 3rd person RPG gives our CPUs a different sort of workload to enjoy:
Dragon Age on the other hand shows an 11.6% gain vs. the i5 760 and equal performance to the Core i7 880. Given that the i5 2400 is slated to be cheaper than the i5 760, I can't complain.
World of Warcraft needs no introduction. An absurd number of people play it, so we're here to benchmark it. Our test favors repeatability over real world frame rates, so our results here will be higher than in the real world with lots of server load. But what our results will tell you is what the best CPU is to get for playing WoW:
Performance in our WoW test is top notch. The i5 2400 is now the fastest CPU we've ever run through our WoW benchmark, the Core i7 980X included.
We've been working on putting together Starcraft II performance numbers, so here's a quick teaser:
A 12% advantage over the Core i7 880 and an 18% improvement over the Core i5 760.
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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.