The State of Ivy Bridge Silicon

Intel finally delivered production quality Ivy Bridge silicon to its partners last month. The launch is still scheduled for this Spring, however there has been a delay of approximately three weeks. Remember what I said earlier about the risks associated with doing too much on the architecture side while shifting to a new process node.

We were able to spend some time with the new high-end Ivy Bridge desktop SKU: Intel's Core i7 3770K. What follows is a preview of its performance. Keep in mind that this is a preview using early drivers and an early Z77 motherboard. The numbers here could change. This preview was not supported or sanctioned by Intel in any way.

The Test

To keep the preview length manageable we're presenting a subset of our results here. For all benchmark results and even more comparisons be sure to use our performance comparison tool: Bench.

Motherboard: ASUS P8Z68-V Pro (Intel Z68)
ASUS Crosshair V Formula (AMD 990FX)
Intel DX79SI (Intel X79)
Intel Z77 Chipset Based Motherboard
Hard Disk: Intel X25-M SSD (80GB)
Crucial RealSSD C300
OCZ Agility 3 (240GB)
Memory: 4 x 4GB G.Skill Ripjaws X DDR3-1600 9-9-9-20
Video Card: ATI Radeon HD 5870 (Windows 7)
AMD Processor Graphics
Intel Processor Graphics
Video Drivers: AMD Catalyst 12.2 Preview
Desktop Resolution: 1920 x 1200
OS: Windows 7 x64

 

The Lineup General Performance
Comments Locked

195 Comments

View All Comments

  • rpsgc - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    All that revenue, all that profit and yet, they STILL can't bet AMD in integrated graphics.

    I think that qualifies as a fail.

    Thanks for (kind of) proving his point?
  • dagamer34 - Thursday, March 8, 2012 - link

    They don't really care to. The point of a business is to make money, not have the best products. The latter only gets solved when AMD gets serious in competing with Intel on power/performance again.
  • Operandi - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    The internet called,"stop wasting my bits".
  • StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    You know what? All you do is bash AMD.
    If you think AMD sucks THAT much and it's engineers and everything else is incredibly bad...
    Then I have a challenge.

    Go build your own Processor or GTFO with the bashing.
  • bennyg - Wednesday, March 7, 2012 - link

    Do not feed the troll.
  • StevoLincolnite - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Except... Intels IGP drivers on Windows are bad already. They are allot worst on the Mac.
    Historically Intel has never supported it's IGP's to *any* great length and even had to throw up a compatibility list for it's IGP's so you know what games they could potentially run.

    Here is a good example:
    http://www.intel.com/support/graphics/intelhdgraph...

    Heck I recall it taking Intel a good 12 months just to enable TnL and Shader Model 3 on the x3100 chips.

    Historically the support has just not been there.
  • earthrace57 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    AMD's CPUs are going to die...sucks to be an AMD fanboy. However, whatever they are doing with their dedicated GPUs, they are doing something right...if they can manage to pull their act together on the driver side, I think AMD would live as a GPU company...
  • earthrace57 - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    I'm sorry, but Llano APUs will stay on top for quite a while; Intel is still at heart a CPU, Llano is part GPU...if AMD can get drivers the quality of nVidias, they will most likely do extremely well on that front.
  • zshift - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    I really enjoyed the added compilation benchmark. This site has the most comprehensive collection of benchmarks that I've seen, it's a one-stop shop for most of my reviews. Keep up the great work!
  • Jamahl - Tuesday, March 6, 2012 - link

    Would be great to see power benchmarks of the IGP, especially vs Llano and the HD 3000. Let's see if the graphics improvements have come at the price of yet more power consumption or if intel has managed to keep that down.

Log in

Don't have an account? Sign up now