Intel’s Sandy Bridge i7-2820QM: Upheaval in the Mobile Landscape
by Jarred Walton on January 3, 2011 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Intel
- Sandy Bridge
- Compal
Mobile Sandy Bridge Medium Gaming Performance
Moving up to medium detail, the picture becomes a lot less rosy. We’ll just forget about the Arrandale IGP and HD 4250 now, as they were generally slow to unplayable at Low settings and become untenable at Medium. Overall, HD 3000 still leads the HD 5470, but the GeForce 320M actually turns in better results at Medium detail and ends up 6% faster. The P520 + HD 5650 lead is now 67%, since more of the bottleneck is shifted to the GPU, or 98% when coupled to Arrandale. NVIDIA’s GT 425M also leads by 68%. If we’re looking for reasonably smooth gaming performance, only Mass Effect 2 and STALKER manage to squeak past the 30FPS mark.
At the Medium settings, we also encountered a few minor glitches with rendering games. For the above six titles, Left 4 Dead 2 is the only problem, with darker graphics than on other GPUs and a much more pronounced film grain effect. You can turn down the latter setting to compensate, but even at maximum brightness the game is still darker than on AMD and NVIDIA graphics. A driver update should be able to address this, but it does serve to illustrate the fact that not all titles will run 100% properly on the current Intel drivers.
That last point raises an interesting question: just how many games will have minor glitches or other issues with the Sandy Bridge IGP? Without testing each game for compatibility, we can’t provide an answer, but we did pull out a large selection of older and newer titles for additional testing. If you have any further requests, feel free to ask and we can try to see if the game(s) in question will run on Sandy Bridge or not—bearing in mind that we don’t have access to all current titles. So let’s see how SNB graphics fare on 14 additional games.
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JarredWalton - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
All of the mobile chips list AES/TXT/vPRO support, unlike the desktop chips. They also all support Quick Sync and have 12 EUs.DesktopMan - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
What about virtualization? Not sure why you are mentioning vPro, the requirement for vPro is usually the chipset, in this case QM67.JarredWalton - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
They don't specifically break out VT-d and VT-x on the mobile products; all the slides state is that the mobile products support virtualization. On the desktop slide, they have a line saying "vPro/TXT/VT-d/SIPP" but on mobile slides the line says "AES/TXT/vPro". There's a second line for both desktops and mobile chips that just says "Intel Virtualization Technology" but it's not too useful since it just says "Yes" on every single Sandy Bridge CPU listed. :-\Hrel - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
finally gaming on IG. Sooo, when do new Nvidia Gpu's come out for laptops?JarredWalton - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Check back on Jan 6. :-pmobomonster - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
AMD is toast. Those are blistering performance numbers that even I did not expect. Incredible that it manages near 30 fps in several games at medium detail settings.The lower power dual core Sandy Bridge models will really put the squeeze on AMD. Even a regular 2520M will give AMD's Brazos a lot of trouble.
tipoo - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Bah, AMD has been toast for years now, if they really were, they would be buttered and eaten already.yes, horrible metaphor is horrible.
Kangal - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
I'm a tech enthusiast especially in the portable device scene, and I always nit-pick things.Which is the reason why I own the Acer 4810TG.
The Core i7 640-UM would be my favourite processor, until I saw this.
The successor, 2657M, seems to have (theoretical) performance improvement of 19% and battery saving of 6%, which is very amazing.
From pure guestimation, this is ~200% (or slightly more) performance of the SU7300 at the same battery life. Whoa!
This would mean new ultra-portable devices (less than 14" and over 6 hours battery life).
If this gets partnered with the ATi 5650 (or its successor), this will bring serious gaming potential to ultra-portable devices *drools*
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BUT, I wish they could add another chip on that (ULV) list.
The exact same thing as the i7 2657M but tossing the dual-core setup for a single core, if it meant they could increase the down the battery life by 70%. (Name it the 1357M?)
I mean, how about real 10 hours battery life (6 cell) on something about as fast as the SU7300 ??
Something like that (Core i7 1357M?) could make Windows7 tablets a more viable option.
davepermen - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
I'd prefer a dualcore with 1ghz, or even 800mhz. as it could still clock to 2ghz or so, it would be fast when needed, but very battery saving else.if intel would go down further, it would most likely by now kill atom in the netbook and tablet area. and in the phone area, atom isn't there yet.
personally, i hate atom for being in the way. ultralow core i1 would be AWESOME.
JarredWalton - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
SpeedStep lets all the SNB processors (mobile versions at least) run at 800MHz when they're not doing anything else. So you've already got what you're asking for, more or less.