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
Video Transcoding Performance
x264 HD 3.03 Benchmark
Graysky's x264 HD test uses x264 to encode a 4Mbps 720p MPEG-2 source. The focus here is on quality rather than speed, thus the benchmark uses a 2-pass encode and reports the average frame rate in each pass.
In the second pass of our x264 test we see a nearly 14% increase over the 2600K. Once again, there's no replacement for more cores in these types of workloads but delivering better performance in a lower TDP than last year's quad-core is great for more thermally conscious desktops.
Software Development Performance
Compile Chromium Test
You guys asked for it and finally I have something I feel is a good software build test. Using Visual Studio 2008 I'm compiling Chromium. It's a pretty huge project that takes over forty minutes to compile from the command line on a Core i3 2100. But the results are repeatable and the compile process will stress all 12 threads at 100% for almost the entire time on a 980X so it works for me.
Ivy Bridge shows more traditional gains in our VS2008 benchmark - performance moves forward here by a few percent, but nothing significant. We are seeing a bit of a compressed dynamic range here for this particular compiler workload, it's quite possible that other bottlenecks are beginning to creep in as we get even faster microarchitectures.
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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.