Ivy Bridge review

Jan 18, 2012 by Ivy Fan

First sites that are more likely to publish Ivy Bridge review are those like Guru3D, Anandtech, Tom’s Hardware, Overclockers Club and so on. Nowadays almost every single one of them, or other well know sites for that matter, get to review the product at the exact time as the others, so upon the NDA (which hasn’t been announced yet for Ivy Bridge) you can see all of them publishing their work.

Who will make the first Ivy Bridge review?

All of them do proper and through testing on all of the aspects that is included in reviewing a new generation platform and processor, and it will be the same with Ivy Bridge review. Those testing and test “translated” from plain numbers can give us except place of each processor in a “tree of performance”. With an introduction of the rest of the hardware that is being used for testing we can see presented lineup of software benchmark suite which are in all cases very similar to each other, from site to site. “Number cruncher” like SiSoft Sandra, memory speed test like Aida, graphics test like 3DMark06/Vantage/11, video decoding like Handbrake, Cyberlink MediaEspresso and rendering beast – the Cinebench. Of course, there are some newer games involved on that matter too as processor is represents like an added power boost to the graphics itself and we will surely see that in Ivy Bridge review.

How will the Ivy Bridge review look like?

We are guessing that the Ivy Bridge review will surpass its predecessor, which had a decent performance spawn in all of those tested field that we mentioned before, for about at least 15-20% in performance or even more, with decrease of power consummation in around 10-20%. That is a bit optimistic now that you look at it, but in reality it is very possible. In the Ivy Bridge review, we will probably see a comparison between AMD Bulldozer and Sandy Bridge-Extreme, but we recon it will stack very well with them by its side, especially against Bulldozer. On that note, we have seen that a user in HWBOT forums leaked latest roadmap information with very detailed benchmark results, comparing the equivalent processors from Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge generation. He also showed how different are parts of the new architecture, those parts which will affect performance. The most extensive testing was done comparing an i7-2600 to an i7-3770K. They both have the same 8M cache size, 3.4 GHz base frequency clock, 4 cores and a hyper threading support. The i7-2600 has Intel HD 3000 graphics, while the Core i7-3770 has HD4000 graphics. Running the Sysmark 2012 (which represents compared performance using business applications), Ivy Bridge showed a mere 7% performance increase over Sandy Bridge. Not that impressive as it might look, but…

What do we expect from Ivy Bridge?

DXPRT (software for consumer’s content creations) showed a well over 10% increase. Cinebench 11.5 showed a 15% performance boost for 3D rendering tasks, while ProShow Gold 4.5 came in with a 13% boost for creation and managing slideshows. Each of this used software is said to show the effect of Ivy Bridge architectural improvements and the new version of Turbo Boost 2.0. A final CPU test using in Microsoft Office Excel 2010 displayed a large 25% performance boost, helped by a lot faster cache. These results represent an average performance boost of about 20% on a wide range of processor demanding tasks, which will be seen in the first Ivy Bridge review. Testing the HD 4000 raw graphics performance, we sew some much more relevant/interesting results. With ArcSoft Media Expresso they have measured Intel Quick Sync Video performance, which has shown a boost of 56%. 3D Mark Vantage graphics test using the entry preset showed a gain of 168% in 3D graphics performance. As we would expect, those all new processors with a much higher clock frequency rate upgrade showed greater performance boost. For example, the i7-2600S is replaced by an i7-3770S, with an increase of much higher 300 MHz in the base clock and 100 MHz in the Turbo Boost 2.0 clock speed. The CPU performance boost is too approximately 20% using the same range of done tests. Actually, we could say that this is Ivy Bridge review before the real review!

UPDATE:

There were some new preliminary (preview) test of Ivy Bridge done by some web sites. One of them was the famous Anandtech.com which is known for its affection toward Intel. You could clearly see that the most benefits got the integrated graphics, almost twice as fast as its predecessor, as for the raw processor power is concerned it went up for just 10%, but the power consumption went down by nearly 20%.   Link to review