Ivy Bridge’s i7 up to 16% faster than Sandy Bridge

With Intel’s new 22nm Ivy Bridge on the horizon, story repeats itself and users are craving to the know the answer to the question “How does it compare to Sandy Bridge?” Luckily, data has been circulating, but remember that these could be as wrong as they could be right, which is the problem most pre-release benchmarks face.

In an internal comparison from Intel, Ivy Bridge proved itself to be between seven to sixteen percent faster than Sandy Bridge. In all fairness, the test compared Sandy Bridge’s Core i7 2600 against Ivy Bridge’s Core i7 3770. Both are quadcore processors with eight threads, 8MB of cache and a base clock speed of 3.4GHz.

ProShow 4.5 is the first software that presents some improvement, where, in a slide show creation, the 3770 ended up beating the 2600 by the smallest margin, 7%. Cinebench 11.5 rendering test and Sysmark 2012 show some more enthusiasm, so to speak, demonstrating a 10% improvement. HDXPRT 2011, a software focusing on consumer content creation, showed up another increase with 12% improvement while Excel 2010 Financial Analysis ‘puts the cherry on the cake’ with the final 16% improvement.

Some have claimed that, despite that fact that core clock, threads and cache were identical, the improvement is mainly due to the higher Turbo clock, however some of the improvement is also thanks to the architectural improvements achieved through the 22nm manufacturing process.

As for the Turbo clock, it proves to be quite a small difference (just 100MHz, the 3770 having 3.9GHz Turbo while the 2600 3.8GHz) it does prove that small help can make quite a big different, even when reducing the power consumption and the temperature of operation at the same time.

Source: Fudzilla