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
Content Creation Performance
Adobe Photoshop CS4
To measure performance under Photoshop CS4 we turn to the Retouch Artists’ Speed Test. The test does basic photo editing; there are a couple of color space conversions, many layer creations, color curve adjustment, image and canvas size adjustment, unsharp mask, and finally a gaussian blur performed on the entire image.
The whole process is timed and thanks to the use of Intel's X25-M SSD as our test bed hard drive, performance is far more predictable than back when we used to test on mechanical disks.
Time is reported in seconds and the lower numbers mean better performance. The test is multithreaded and can hit all four cores in a quad-core machine.
Our Photoshop test is well threaded but it doesn't peg all cores constantly. Instead you get burstier behavior. With the core count advantage out of the way, SNB-E steps aside and allows the 3770K to step up as the fastest CPU we've tested here. The performance advantage over the 2600K is around 9%.
3dsmax 9
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.
In another FP heavy workload we see a pretty reasonable gain for Ivy Bridge: 8.5% over a 2600K. This isn't enough to make you want to abandon your Sandy Bridge, but it's a good step forward for a tick.
Cinebench 11.5
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.
The single threaded Cinebench test shows a 9% performance advantage for the 3770K over the 2600K. The gap increases slightly to 11% as we look at the multithreaded results:
If you're running a workload that can really stress multiple cores, the 6-core Sandy Bridge E parts will remain unstoppable but in the quad-core world, Ivy Bridge leads the pack.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
195 Comments
View All Comments
dagamer34 - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Most players who game at 1920x1080 also have graphics cards that cost more than $100. That's not what this was testing.kensiko - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Man you won't believe the difference :)Get an SSD with that.
dagamer34 - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
You're going to seriously start wondering why you didn't upgrade sooner. Just don't hurt yourself too much when you slap your own face. Tech has advanced astronomically in the last 10 years.Heck, I'm pretty sure the iPad 2 is faster than your Northwood Pentium 4.
Yojimbo - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
uhh.. i don't think that's true. graphics intensive applications are not the only ones that benefit from fast CPUs.krumme - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
Where does Charlie claim to be biased?But i agree, this sacred, aura, "this is not sanctioned by Intel" is a pain to read. It makes thesse articles a little bit difficult to start reading :)
But how profitable, and how good a business do you have if you dont have "good conections"? - charlie uses his for underhand information, anand his to get info before the others. Its very obvious for us to interprete Anands article because we know the obvious, - it have to be profitable for both anand and Intel. But what about Charlie, what is the motives for the people leaking info to him? - its not quite so obvious and transparrent.
awg0681 - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
"Sure, he was comparing Intel graphics to Intel graphics, except he wasn't, because he himself threw Llano in there to compare."By the same token, if he had not included Llano results people would be wondering where they were and complaining that they weren't included. Puts Anand in a catch 22 when deciding whether or not to include Llano.
There is validity to the complaint about the numbers being incorrect. Those should be looked at and corrected. Glossing over the results and no mention of Llano being more capable, again, this was mainly to compare Intel v Intel in a preview of their new chip and improvements they've made since last gen. Sure, he could've been more thorough with the AMD v Intel side, but that's not really what this article was about. We could also go to a steakhouse and complain there's not a large vegetarian meal selection too.
Azeraph - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link
it doesn't really matter if the igp isn't that great most people don't buy them for their graphics power.I get the feeling that maybe intel is just putting them out there to keep it's base solid against AMD,Not that it needs it and i'm an amd fan. i found something the other day that will possibly change how tomorrows processors will use light instead of electricity.http://scitechdaily.com/penn-researchers-build-a-c...
arno - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
...hi everybody.I'm an electrical engineer, doing intensive "spice" simulations.
I want to know if, as it requires a lot of floating point calculations, does it worth to wait for Ivy Bridge instead of buying right now a laptop with a quadcore Sandy Bridge? I expected Ivy Bridge for March and i've been waiting since last december :(.
To buy now would be very comfortable, as i'm in the simulaiton phase of my project. To buy later, I believe, would make more sense in term of pure performances . But how much sense is the question....
Thanks for sharing
PS (another thing is also theuse of 1600 memory instead of 1333, which might be doing it for another software I use)
arno - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
I wonder how IvyBridge perform in term offloating point calculations as I do intensive electrical simulations.I urgently need an upgrade and would definitely go for a Ivy Bridge. But I've been waiting a long time now and Ivy Bridge may again been delayed.
Does anyone have an advice about it?
Thanks for sharing.
Nomorehero - Friday, March 9, 2012 - link
How about OC? Info please?Is hard to decide wait until IB or get SB now because the how well IB can OC.