The Ivy Bridge Preview: Core i7 3770K Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on March 6, 2012 8:16 PM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Core i7
- Ivy Bridge
Final Words
Based on these early numbers, Ivy Bridge is pretty much right where we expected it on the CPU side. You're looking at a 5 - 15% increase in CPU performance over Sandy Bridge at a similar price point. I have to say that I'm pretty impressed by the gains we've seen here today. It's quite difficult to get tangible IPC improvements from a modern architecture these days, particularly on such a strict nearly-annual basis. For a tick in Intel's cadence, Ivy Bridge is quite good. It feels a lot like Penryn did after Conroe, but better.
The improvement on the GPU side is significant. Although not nearly the jump we saw going to Sandy Bridge last year. Ivy's GPU finally puts Intel's processor graphics into the realm of reasonable for a system with low end GPU needs. Based on what we've seen, discrete GPUs below the $50 - $60 mark don't make sense if you've got Intel's HD 4000 inside your system. The discrete market above $100 remains fairly safe however.
With Ivy Bridge you aren't limited to playing older titles, although you are still limited to relatively low quality settings on newer games. If you're willing to trade off display resolution you can reach a much better balance. We are finally able to deliver acceptable performance at or above 1366 x 768. With the exception of Metro 2033, the games we tested even showed greater than 30 fps at 1680 x 1050. The fact that we were able to run Crysis: Warhead at 1680 x 1050 at over 50 fps on free graphics from Intel is sort of insane when you think about where Intel was just a few years ago.
Whether or not this is enough for mainstream gaming really depends on your definition of that segment of the market. Being able to play brand new titles at reasonable frame rates as realistic resolutions is a bar that Intel has safely met. I hate to sound like a broken record but Ivy Bridge continues Intel's march in the right direction when it comes to GPU performance. Personally, I want more and I suspect that Haswell will deliver much of that. It is worth pointing out that Intel is progressing at a faster rate than the discrete GPU industry at this point. Admittedly the gap is downright huge, but from what I've heard even the significant gains we're seeing here with Ivy will pale in comparison to what Haswell provides.
What Ivy Bridge does not appear to do is catch up to AMD's A8-series Llano APU. It narrows the gap, but for systems whose primary purpose is gaming AMD will still likely hold a significant advantage with Trinity. The fact that Ivy Bridge hasn't progressed enough to challenge AMD on the GPU side is good news. The last thing we need is for a single company to dominate on both fronts. At least today we still have some degree of competition in the market. To Intel's credit however, it's just as unlikely that AMD will surpass Intel in CPU performance this next round with Trinity. Both sides are getting more competitive, but it still boils down to what matters more to you: GPU or CPU performance. Similarly, there's also the question of which one (CPU or GPU) approaches "good enough" first. I suspect the answer to this is going to continue to vary wildly depending on the end user.
The power savings from 22nm are pretty good on the desktop. Under heavy CPU load we measured a ~30W decrease in total system power consumption compared to a similar Sandy Bridge part. If this is an indication of what we can expect from notebooks based on Ivy Bridge I'd say you shouldn't expect significant gains in battery life under light workloads, but you may see improvement in worst case scenario battery life. For example, in our Mac battery life suite we pegged the Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro at around 2.5 hours of battery life in our heavy multitasking scenario. That's the number I'd expect to see improve with Ivy Bridge. We only had a short amount of time with the system and couldn't validate Intel's claims of significant gains in GPU power efficiency but we'll hopefully be able to do that closer to launch.
There's still more to learn about Ivy Bridge, including how it performs as a notebook chip. If the results today are any indication, it should be a good showing all around. Lower power consumption and better performance at the same price as last year's parts - it's the Moore's Law way. There's not enough of an improvement to make existing SNB owners want to upgrade, but if you're still clinging to an old Core 2 (or earlier) system, Ivy will be a great step forward.
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BoFox - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
There are three different versions of HD 5570 (DDR2, DDR3, and GDDR5 - with the GDDR5 having FIVE times as much bandwidth as the DDR2 version).There are also two different versions of HD 5450 (DDR2 and DDR3).
It would be appreciated if you could let us know which versions were used in the benchmarks in this article. Thanks
BoFox - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Just let us know which GPU was used for the discrete GPU tests! LOL..KZ0 - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
"ATI Radeon HD 5870 (Windows 7)", page 4:)
WiZARD7 - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
There should be a comparison at the same clock speed - nehalem - sandy bridge - ivy bridge (@4 Ghz )Breach1337 - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
On page, shouldn't:" Doing so won't give you access to some of the newer 7-series chipset features like PCIe Gen 3 (some 6-series boards are claiming 3.0 support), native USB 3.0 (many 6-series boards have 3rd party USB 3.0 controllers) and Intel's Rapid Start Technology."
say
" Doing so will give you access to some of the newer 7-series chipset features like PCIe Gen 3 (some 6-series boards are claiming 3.0 support), native USB 3.0 (many 6-series boards have 3rd party USB 3.0 controllers) and Intel's Rapid Start Technology."
iwod - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
There are many thing not mentioned.Intel are strong in Software everywhere except the Gfx drivers department. No wonder why others call Anand a pro Intel site, i dont want to believe it, until all the article continue to label Intel are hard at work on Gfx drivers when they are clearly not. They are better then what they are used to be, but still far from good.
Graphics Quality on Intel IGP are not even close to what AMD offers.
Even if Haswell double the performance of Ivy they will still be one generation behind AMD.
I continue to wonder why they use their own GPU on Desktop / Laptop and not on Mobile SoC. They could have used PowerVR on Desktop as well, developing drivers for one hardware will simplify things and hopefully have bigger incentive to increase software R&D.
meloz - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
>>No wonder why others call Anand a pro Intel siteWhat should he do, fake the benchmark results to make AMD look better than they are? Anand can only report his findings, he does this truthfully. Some people do not want to accept reality and prefer to shoot the messenger. Direct your frustrations towards AMD, not websites which report results of benchmarks.
From past benchmarks you can see the results at Anandtech are that different from other websites, AMD is getting destroyed on CPU perfomance and performance / watt metric.
>>I continue to wonder why they use their own GPU on Desktop / Laptop and not on Mobile SoC. They could have used PowerVR on Desktop as well,
FYI, they are dumping PowerVR in near future as well. Already covered on many websites, google it. PowerVR was a temporary fix, or rather an attempt at a fix which was more of a hassle and didn't work in the marketplace anyway.
They are now comitted to improving their own iGPU and drivers. This will take time for sure, Intel marches to its own beat.
The simple fact is that with the much weaker Sandy Brdige iGPU they outsold AMD 15 to 1, so even though the Ivy Bridge iGPU has not surpassed AMD yet, Intel should continue to do really well.
>>i dont want to believe it, until all the article continue to label Intel are hard at work on Gfx drivers when they are clearly not.
You can believe whatever you want to believe, this is not about beliefs but facts. As a user of Sandy Bridge and linux I know better than most just how much Intel drivers suck. In fact, their linux iGPU drivers suck much worse than Windows version (hard to imagine, but true) and weren't truly ready until Mesa 8.0, more than a year after release of the hardware.
But I also know they are working on things like SNA which in early test already offers ~20% performance boost.
No word on when it will be consumer ready, but Intel are working and steadily improving on drivers side as well. Perhaps not at the pace you want. You do not have to accept reality if it is so difficult for you, don't blame websites for reporting reality, however.
I am almost grateful Intel is not 'good enough' on GPU side as yet. It keeps AMD alive another year. Hopefully.
meloz - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
>>From past benchmarks you can see the results at Anandtech are that different from other websitesShould read: From past benchmarks you can see the results at Anandtech are NOT that different from other websites.
Sigh, allow us to edit posts, if only for 10 minutes or so after making the initial post.
ET - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
PowerVR has lower performance and fewer features, so would not be a good PC solution. I'm also sure that Intel would rather have its own solution, it's just that it can't yet compete with PowerVR at the low power arena. I imagine that if Intel succeeds in mobile space it will try to create its own low power 3D core.As for graphics drivers, I'm sure Intel is hard at work at them, but probably has fewer people than AMD on that. Far as I can see it's no longer the case that reviews with Intel graphics keep talking about what didn't run correctly, which means that things are getting better.
Belard - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link
Anyone notice in the Compile Chromium Test in which CORE count actually matters...AMD's "8 core" fx8150 doesn't come close to the 3770K, much less the 2500K (4 core/4 thread) CPU.
But give it to AMD for Llano for easily out-performing intel with built-in graphics, handy for notebooks. AMD should have put GPUs into the fx-line.
The odd-thing about intel's HD-Graphics is that the lower-end really needs to have the HD4000 more than the higher end.