The Sandy Bridge Preview
by Anand Lal Shimpi on August 27, 2010 2:38 PM EST3dsmax 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:
This is another one of those situations where the Core i5 2400 without Hyper Threading is able to perform on par with the Core i7 880 with Hyper Threading. Compared to the i5 760 it’s 20.5% faster.
With Hyper Threading enabled, the Core i5 2400 is actually dangerously close to the 6-core 980X. Whatever Intel has done to Sandy Bridge's FP is big.
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 was particularly surprising because it gives us a good opportunity to look at single threaded FP performance. Compared to a similarly clocked Lynnfield, Sandy Bridge can deliver 11% better performance. Compared to a similarly positioned Lynnfield, Sandy Bridge is about 20% faster. Note that this is without turbo enabled. The retail 3.1GHz chip should turbo up to 3.4GHz in this test, giving it a 9.6% frequency boost.
In the multithreaded test Sandy Bridge’s per-core performance is even better than Lynnfield with HT enabled.
I also ran a few numbers using Cinebench R11.5. I didn’t have the opportunity to test the i5 2400 with HT enabled in this test so I measured performance of the i7 880 with HT enabled/disabled to compare per-thread performance.
Sandy Bridge's FP performance is very good. Clock for clock we see a 15.6% improvement over Lynnfield (4C/4T vs. 4C/4T). Compared to the proposed similarly priced Core i5 760, the i5 2400 would be 29.5% faster.
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.
The similarly positioned/priced Core i5 760 is beat by 17%. There’s no replacement for more cores/threads however as the i7 880 and X6 parts both pull ahead. Turn on HT to level the playfield (at least within Intel) and Sandy Bridge is 15% faster than Lynnfield.
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DrRap - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
It's Anand "intel" lal Shimpi.Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
I agree that single threaded performance is important to keep in mind. Sandy Bridge had a larger ILP boost than I expected. Final silicon with turbo enabled should address that even more.We got into trouble chasing the ILP train for years. At this point both AMD and Intel are focused on thread level parallelism. I'm not sure that we'll see significant ILP gains from either party for quite a while now.
The socket move is silly, unfortunately there's nothing that can be done about that. AMD takes better care of its existing board owners, that's something we've pointed out in prior reviews (e.g. our Phenom II X6 review).
I'm not sure I'd call Sandy Bridge a kiddie chip however. It looks like it'll deliver great bang for your buck when it launches in Q1 regardless of how threaded your workload is.
Value scatterplots are a great idea, Scott does a wonderful job with them. We're going to eventually integrate pricing data with Bench (www.anandtech.com/bench) which should help you as well :)
Take care,
Anand
ssj4Gogeta - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
I'm guessing USB 3.0 support will be introduced later with a chipset upgrade. Why are you so concerned with GHz when Sandy Bridge delivers more IPC? I think having better IPC instead of more GHz is better as you'll get potentially lower power consumption.asmoma - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Lets just hope AMD trhows in 80 gpu cores into ontario to bring this SB igp to shame(almost the same performance but less than 10w tdp). And lets also hope they throw in those 400 cores into Llano we have been hearing about.mfago - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Any news on OpenCL support? I image Apple may hold off on a purely integrated GPU unless that is supported.Thanks!
Anand Lal Shimpi - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Sandy Bridge's GPU does not support OpenCL. This is strictly a graphics play, Intel doesn't have an announced GPU compute strategy outside of what it's doing with Larrabee.Take care,
Anand
DanNeely - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
Is intel actually still doing anything with Larrabee on the gfx side? I thought they killed it on that end entirely and were looking at it strictly as a compute platform now.Anand Lal Shimpi - Saturday, August 28, 2010 - link
Correct - as of today the only Larrabee parts are for the HPC market. Didn't mean to confuse there :)Take care,
Anand
JonnyDough - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
"Correction, you'll be able to buy it next year, but you'll get to meet her today."Sandy could be a boy too!
JonnyDough - Friday, August 27, 2010 - link
By the way, is it a an it, or a girl? You can't have it both ways!