Ivy Bridge benchmark

Jan 18, 2012 by Ivy Fan

Although it’s not yet official out, some preliminary tests were caught by the individuals that have managed to get a hand on one of the Ivy Bridge processor. We have seen some users across the vast choice of forums, like at coolaler, that have published results of some testing sessions using on some early Ivy Bridge benchmark samples that came out.

Preliminary Ivy Bridge benchmark tests

The memories that were used ran at pretty high clock speeds, 2134 MHz 6-9-6-24 CR2, so the results should be higher than they are. Although this chip is running at relatively slow/low core clock speeds, it is early silicon and does not represent expected clock speeds. A number of tests on Ivy Bridge benchmark were performed on two different frequencies; at 2.0 GHz and 2.6GHz. Also user at Bit-tech performed some tests with as Sandy Bridge-Extreme (the most powerful one on the market – i7-3960X) underclocked to 2 GHz to compare results. The i7-3960X had hyper threading enabled and all cores were active (at some cases he reduced the number of using threads to 8).

Identical performance of Sandy and Ivy

Running with stock speed frequencies of 2.00 GHz and a Turbo Boost speed of 2.4GHz, this chip was shown running at 2.4GHz with 4 GB of RAM. The results in memory Ivy Bridge benchmark software, AIDA64, were a little lower than Sandy Bridge in overall, probably that lower result is result of lacking support for Ivy Bridge benchmark in AIDA64 and by the motherboard itself. Testing continued on with rendering software Cinebench, the 3960X (using all of its 12 threads) manage to get 5.69 points, compared to 3.35 on the Ivy Bridge benchmark. So far the given test results are pretty much promising, and it will be nice to see what are we finally going to get as we get closer to the release date. These chips are believed to be of a stepping B2 wafer, although that information is still unconfirmed. A single thread benchmark, using SuperPI, showed that both chips have identical performance. Using the Fritz Chess for Ivy Bridge benchmark, the Sandy Bridge-Extreme Core i7 – 3960X (using 8 threads) only scored 20% better than the four threaded Ivy Bridge processor.

Ivy Bridge won at the end

Several media is talking about the fact processor sports B3 stepping, which is probably wrong. According to CPU-Z it has “Stepping 4″ and coolaler self thinks that the stepping is probably really B1. The letter B in stepping can tells us that the processor has gone through major revision since the output of the first silicon. It is not unlikely that the Ivy Bridge processors that we will see at our vendor will be on stepping B2, since a new stepping will usually take three month period to develop and manufacture. As what it is worth from the lack of information, Core i5 Ivy Bridge benchmark processors that were tested showed a CPU performance boost of between 11% and 13%.