Early Ivy Bridge Benchmark: Graphics Performance Greatly Improved

The folks over at Anandtech managed to spend some time with early Ivy bridge production samples and perform a few benchmarks. The skinny: CPU performance is mildly increased as expected, but the GPU is 20-50% faster than the Sandy Bridge GPU. Power consumption is also down about 30W under full load. The graphics, however, are still slower than AMD's Llano (but the Ivy Bridge CPU beats the pants off of the Fusion's). Is the tradeoff worth it?

Comments

Tradeoff?

[Sycraft-fu]

It isn't meant to be powerful graphics. It isn't a "tradeoff". Intel's HD graphics are meant to be very low power, but competent enough to run basics, shiny OS features at least. That they do, and it sounds like IB is even better at that. But it isn't a "tradeoff" to get a good CPU with basic graphics that is called "normal". If you need good graphics discrete is still the way to go and there are plenty of reasonable options.

From the look of it, Ivy Bridge is quite a win. Sandy Bridge, but a bit better. Nothing not to like there.

Re:Tradeoff?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

There have been a few stabs at it, I think both ATI and Nvidia have released more-or-less-orphaned-on-launch partnerships with some laptop outfit or other, using proprietary cabling.

My understanding is that there are a few major hurdles:

Historically, there really haven't been any good standardized high-bandwidth interfaces to the outside world on laptops. The proprietary docking station port, if provided, might connect directly to the PCI bus; but your next best bets were relatively lousy things like PCMCIA or USB. Even with PCIe, you get 1x from an expresscard slot; but the standards for external cabling for anything beefier than that have been languishing in the PCIe SIG forever...

Unless you are content to use an external monitor only, an 'expansion GPU' both has to have access to all the usual bandwidth that a GPU requires and have enough bandwidth(and suitable software/firmware cooperation) to dump its framebuffer back to whatever internal GPU is driving the laptop screen. You can get(albeit at unattractive prices) enclosures that connect to the 1xPCIe lane in an expresscard slot and break that out into a mechanically 16xPCIe card enclosure with supplemental power. Assuming the BIOS isn't a clusterfuck, you can pop in an expansion card just as you would on a desktop. That only gets you the video outs, though, it doesn't solve the trickier and more system-specific problem of driving the laptop screen.

Docking stations: At present, laptop manufacturers get to designate one line as 'enterprise' by including the necessary connector, and then charge a stiff fee for the proprietary docking station as your only option to drive a few extra heads. I imagine that this blunts the enthusiasm of the major enterprise laptop players for a well-standardized and high bandwidth external connector.

Re:Tradeoff?

[hairyfeet]

But it IS a tradeoff Blanche, it is. You see most folks are embracing the wonder that is "The Internet" and all the TV movies and other entertainment that this wonderful medium has to offer and Intel GPUs...well they suck REALLY hard.

But here is the dirty little secret AMD knows that Intel doesn't want you to hear, going so far as to shoot their Atom division in the face by killing off the Nvidia chipset business and hobbling Atom with insanely shitty rules like "Only 10 inches with crappy resolution" and "Only 2Gb of RAM" and the secret is this...Most folks simply aren't slamming even 5 year old chips hard enough to worry about, much less the newer ones. You see chips passed "Good enough" for the vast majority once we hit dual cores, so the fact that AMD's chips are 30% slower really doesn't matter if the user is only using less than half the power available anyway. And having that really nice GPU makes everything nice and smooth, with great HD video and even gaming if you so desire, although the majority isn't playing heavy CPU slamming games but crap like Farmville and Mob Wars

This is why both my desktop and netbook are AMD and I sold my full size for the netbook because i found when I was mobile I simply wasn't hitting the CPU hard enough to matter. My Thuban X6 has OCing headroom up the wazoo should I ever need it but with most games barely hitting dual cores and transcoding on 6 cores being so sweet i doubt I'll need it and the E350? Man whomever designed that chip needs to be given a Corvette and a raise by AMD because that thing is bloody brilliant! 6 hours playing HD video at default voltages (BTW if you have an E or C series check out Brazos Tweaker as you can add 20%-30% battery life by using it) and the ability to just pop in an HDMI cable for full 1080p goodness, hell it even plays L4D, Bioshock II, and GTA:VC (I could play the newer GTA games but I don't care for them) and all while staying cool to the touch and quiet as a churchmouse. The OEMs have taken notice (now that Intel isn't bribing them not to anymore) and you can see everything from HTPCs to laptops and netbooks to all in ones and desktops running Brazos. In fact last time I walked into my local Walmart Supercenter there were only 2 Intel units, both of which were bottom o' the line Atoms, the rest of the store? All AMD Fusions. I've built several office boxes (the traditional stronghold of Intel) with the E350 and the employees just love them, whisper quiet while giving them plenty of power for their everyday tasks.

Where Intel screwed the pooch was being too greedy. they SHOULD have made a deal with Nvidia to ensure plenty of new GPUs for their chips and instead they wiped out the entire Nvidia chipset business and made many of their chips simply overpriced and underperforming, especially in the laptop arena where you can't add a discrete. ION and Optimus was the perfect answer, with the low power shitty Intel chip for when you were on battery and the Nvidia chip when you were plugged in but now that the option is gone frankly I wouldn't touch Intel on a mobile unless it had a discrete and i warn my customers of the same. As we get more and more multimedia heavy folks want good graphics with smooth video and nice gaming and intel just don't have that. You can buy an AMD A series for probably half of what this chip is gonna cost, an E series for like one fifth, and while you won't notice the CPU unless you are doing number crunching or some other task one doesn't do on a mobile often you WILL notice the much nicer graphics. Intel just went the wrong direction on this IMHO and will pay the price.

But still slower then a "real" video card...

[Kenja]

Frankly, I am sick and tired of these integrated GPUs. The theory is that its a cost saver, but since I just put in a dedicated graphics card it ends up being a cost with no benefit. Ah well.

Re:But still slower then a "real" video card...

[timeOday]

I would like to see the ability to use the integrated GPU, even if not for graphics. The traditional CPU is good for sequential logic. But for pattern recognition, physics simulations (which is basically what 3d graphics is), encoding, or code-cracking (e.g. bitcoin), the highly parallel structure of the GPU is better. Now you might argue, my offboard GPU is still the same thing, but better. OK. But these are inherently parallel tasks, so if you could use the one built-in AND the add-on, you wouldn't be wasting anything.

Re:But still slower then a "real" video card...

[Halo1]

Look at the die layout for Sandy Bridge, there's no Ivy Bridge layout yet but it's probably the same. You see that huge chunk called "graphics"? Me neither, it's somewhere in those small "misc io" bits. That's the only little thing of your CPU you aren't using with a dGPU.

I guess that's simply a chip without an integrated GPU. Here's a picture of a Sandy Bridge Core i7 with GPU.

Depends on what you mean

[Sycraft-fu]

So basically all laptops that have discrete graphics have it socketed in an nVidia MXM slot. Way cheaper to have one board and just knock cards on it for the manufacturers. However the thing is that since it is for OEMs and not consumers, it isn't as easy to swap as a PCI card. It is all on you to make sure the card you are getting is physically the right size, electrically something you system can handle, and thermally not to much.

Also pretty much only Sager actually supports doing it, and other laptop manufacturer will tell you to GTFO if you ask them about it. As such even finding the parts isn't easy.

With laptops you don't really upgrade much other than maybe the RAM or disk.

However the IB will be useful in laptops not only because it can give better performance for integrated only systems, but it'll be nice for switchable ones. You can get ATi card systems where you can manually switch between discrete and integrated and nVidia ones that do it on the fly. Better integrated graphics means you can use them for more things, so when on battery it is more feasible to use them and leave the discrete system shut down.

However note this wasn't a laptop part they are talking about, this is the desktop part.

Re:GPU performance always wins

[UnknowingFool]

True but integrated is getting better. At this point the budget nVidia and AMD discrete cards are slightly better than Intel but IMO not worth the $50 for the slight upgrade. You are better off spending a little more and moving towards mid-range for a lot more performance.

Re:GPU Performance

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

The main reason that integrated GPU performance matters(aside from the fact that it is all the GPU you get in any too-cheap or too-skinny device that doesn't have a discrete option) is that it defines the (overwhelmingly common) baseline for what 'PC graphics' means. If that situation is uniformly awful, GPU intensive stuff will continue to be fairly niche, which leads to a chicken-and-egg issue: if integrated graphics suck, the market for GPU intensive stuff will be constrained, which will reduce the incentive to improve GPU performance, and so it goes...

Re:Ivy bridge vs ARM

[armanox]

As soon as ARM tries to catch up to the performance of x86 (and x64) it no longer has the lower power consumption.