Intel Core i5 3470 Review: HD 2500 Graphics Tested
by Anand Lal Shimpi on May 31, 2012 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- CPUs
- Intel
- Ivy Bridge
- GPUs
General Performance
The general performance of the Core i5-3470 is nothing too unusual. We know from our original Ivy Bridge review that the advantage over Sandy Bridge is typically in the single digits. In other words, if Sandy Bridge was a good upgrade for your current system, Ivy Bridge won't change things. Idle power doesn't really improve over Sandy Bridge, but load power is a bit better.
Compared to the 3770K, you will lose out on heavily threaded performance due to the lack of Hyper Threading. But for many client workloads, including gaming, you can expect the 3470 to perform quite similarly to the 3770K.
| Power Consumption Comparison | ||||
| Intel DZ77GA-70K | Idle | Load (x264 2nd pass) | ||
| Intel Core i7-3770K | 60.9W | 121.2W | ||
| Intel Core i5-3470 | 54.4W | 96.6W | ||
| Intel Core i5-3470 @ 4GHz | 54.4W | 110.1W | ||
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BSMonitor - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link
f they truly were interested in building the best APU. And by that, a knockout iGPU experience.Where are the dual-core Core i7's with 30-40 EU's??
Or the AMD <whatevers> (not sure anymore what they call their APU) Phenom X2 CPU with 1200 Shaders??
When we are talking about a truly GPU intense application, a LOT of times single/dual core CPU is enough. Heck, if you were to take a dual-core Core 2, and stick it with a GeForce 670 or Radeon 7950.. You would see very similar numbers in terms of gaming performance to what's in the BENCH charts. ESP at the 1920x1080 and below.
Surely Intel can afford another die that aims a ton of transistors at just the GPU side of things. AMD, maybe. Why do we get from BOTH, their top end iGPU stuck with the most transistors dedicated to the CPU??
I find it hard to believe anyone shopping for an APU is hoping for amazing CPU performance to go with their average iGPU performance. That market would be the opposite. Sacrifice a few threads on the CPU side for amazing iGPU.
Am I missing something technically limiting?? Is that many GPU units overkill in terms of power/heat dissipation of the CPU socket??
tipoo - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link
Well, their chips have to work in a certain set of thermal limits. Maybe at this point 1200 shader cores would not be possible on the same die as a quad core CPU for power consumption and heat reasons. I think Haswel will have 64 EUs though if the rumours are true.Roland00Address - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link
There is no point of a 1200 shaders apu due to memory bandwidth. You couldn't feed a beast of an apu with only dual channel 1600 mhz memory when that same memory limits the performance of llano and trinity compared to their gpu cousins which have the same calculation units and core clocks but the gpus perform significantly better.silverblue - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link
Possibly, but at the moment, bandwidth is a surefire performance killer.BSMonitor - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link
Good Points. But currently, Intel has Quad Channel DDR3-1600 up on the Socket 2011. I am sure AMD could get more bandwidth there too, if they step up the memory controller.My overall point, is that neither is even trying for a low-medium transistor CPU and a high transistor GPU.
It's either Low-Medium CPU with Low-Medium GPU (disabled cores and what have you), or High End CPU with "High End" GPU.
There is no attempt at giving up CPU die space for more GPU transistors from either.. None. If you someone spends $$ on the High End of the CPU (Quad Core i7), the implementation of iGPU is not even close to worth using for that much CPU.
Roland00Address - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link
Quad Channel is not a "free upgrade" it requires much more traces on the motherboard as well as more pins on the cpu socket. This dramtically increases costs for the motherboard and the cpu. Both of those are going against what AMD is trying to do with their APUs which will be both laptop as well as desktop chips. They are trying to increase their margins on their chips not decrease them.You have a large number OEMs only putting a single 4gb ddr3 stick in laptops and desktops (thus not achieving dual channel) in the current apus. You want think those same vendors are suddenly going to put 16gbs of memory on an apu (and it is going to be 16gbs since 2gb ddr3 sticks are being phased out via the memory manufactures.)
tipoo - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link
I'm curious why the HD4000 outperforms something like the 5450 by nearly double in Skyrim, yet falls behind in something like Portal or Civ, or even Minecraft? Is it immature drivers or something in the architecture itself?ShieTar - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link
For Minecraft, read the article and what it has to say about OpenGL.For Portal or Civ, it might very well be related to Memory Bandwidth. The HD2500 can have 25.6 GB/s (with DDR3-1600), or even more. The 5450 generally comes with half as much (12.8 GB/s), or even a quarter of it since there are also 5450s with DDR2.
As a matter of fact, I remember reading several reports on how much the Llano-Graphics would improve with faster Memory, even beyond DDR3-1600. I havn't seen any tests on the impact of memory speed from Ivy Bridge or Trinity yet, but that would be interesting given their increased computing powers.
silverblue - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link
I'm sure it'll matter for both, more so for Trinity. I'm not sure we'll see much in the way of a comparison until the desktop Trinity appears, but for IB, I'm certainly waiting.tipoo - Thursday, May 31, 2012 - link
Having half the memory bandwidth would lead to the reverse expectation, the 5450 is close to or even surpasses the HD4000 with twice the bandwidth in those games, yet the 4000 beats it by almost double in games like Skyrim, even the 2500 beats it there.