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Intel Officially Lifts the Veil On Ivy Bridge
New submitter zackmerles writes "Tom's Hardware takes the newly-released, top-of-the-line Ivy Bridge Core i7-3770K for a spin. All Core i7 Ivy Bridge CPUs come with Intel HD Graphics 4000, which despite the DirectX 11 support, only provides a modest boost to the Sandy Bridge Intel HD Graphics 3000. However, the new architecture tops the charts for low power consumption, which should make the Ivy Bridge mobile offerings more desirable. In CPU performance, the new Ivy Bridge Core i7 is only marginally better than last generation's Core i7-2700K. Essentially, Ivy Bridge is not the fantastic follow-up to Sandy Bridge that many enthusiasts had hoped for, but an incremental improvement. In the end, those desktop users who decided to skip Sandy Bridge to hold out for Ivy Bridge, probably shouldn't have. On the other hand, since Intel priced the new Core i7-3770K and Core i5-3570K the same as their Sandy Bridge counterparts, there is no reason to purchase the previous generation chips."
Reader jjslash points out that coverage is available from all the usual suspects — pick your favorite: AnandTech, TechSpot, Hot Hardware, ExtremeTech, and Overclockers.
So, Intel, a company with no real competition right now in the market, has produced a product that offers only a very slight performance boost, and relied on tons of marketing to drum up anticipation for this mediocre offering. And then priced it the same as existing offerings as an apology to those who waited. Actually, that sounds about par for the course these days. The only real news in cpus and motherboards has been that they've gone multicore and continue to increase bandwidth. And now that they can't squeeze any more performance out of the designs, they're working on decreasing energy consumption.
#fuckbeta #iamslashdot #dicemustdie
A roundup of reviews from the usual major sites as well as others not mentioned in the summary above: Overclockers Review, Anandtech Review, Anandtech Undervolting/Overclocking, HardwareSecrets, Bit-tech, PCPer, Tweaktown, Hard OCP, The Inquirer, Techspot, Computer Shopper, Tom's Hardware, ExtremeTech, PC Mag, Overclockers Club, and Guru 3d
Overclockers
Who exactly is going to use the onboard video? How about having an option WITHOUT it and discount the chip?
Also, remember when there was a time that a CPU launch meant you were going to get 50-100% increase?
And now we're wanking off over a whopping *potential* 20%. Disappointing.
I'm not sure what this guy is reading or if he's high or what, but Ivy Bridge is a significant improvement from what I've been able to derive. Soon as they are available I'm buying one.
In the end, those desktop users who decided to skip Sandy Bridge to hold out for Ivy Bridge, probably shouldn't have.
Well, that rather depends on how many Ivy Bridge recalls there will be, doesn't it?
If we put the cost aside for a moment, the new Intel CPU keeps the Moore's law standard and the power to compute ration is accordingly increased compered to the previous CPU. So I don't get why people complain.
Love many, trust a few, do harm to none.
Okay, so I have been planning a long term computer strategy since 2006 when I got a decent first gen Quad Core.
So hopefully if I can hold out that long, I should wait for the Tock - Haswell architecture, at the same time waiting for the Post-Win8-Metro consensus, which might just be either a Tock for Microsoft or maybe even a paradigm explosion into Apple and/or Linux if by some Mayan Miracle Microsoft implodes as a company. Or, if there is no "Windows 9", then I'll have to think about what to do then.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine
...or are these not that great? I was reading a phoronix article and with march=native even bulldozer holds it's own to these things.
can't wait for pilediver.
Speaking of which, what's a good CPU for a developer laptop (functioning as a desktop replacement)?
I was thinking I needed to have at least a Core i3 because it supports Intel Virtualization Extensions (VT-x). But then I read that VirtualBox doesn't really use hardware virtualization much. So even a Dual Core B940 should suffice, right?
Of course, in the day, we all had Pentium 4's, and today's processors are all many times faster than that.
(I'm not compiling C++ or even Java most of the time.)
I'm not a lawyer, but I play one on the Internet. Blog
"For the budget conscious consumer, there is no reason to get the budget nVidia or Radeon."
Except for the fact that a An AMD llano A8 will blow an ivy bridge out of the water when it comes to games. Plenty of consumers
who buy $500 budget pcs never open the case.
It avoids a problem many companies have of fighting with a new design and a new process, and having a product that gets delayed, has issues, etc. They either use a new design, on a stable process, or an untested process, with a proven design.
Sometimes a new process can give a moderate sized performance bump due to higher clock speeds, but that doesn't always happen.
It does reduce power consumption though and that is always nice.
Intel's onboard GPUs are good enough to play games these days. No you won't be cranking up the graphics detail, but they'll do the trick to play many games. You might notice on the linked page it is running Skyrim in medium detail at a playable framerate. That is a modern game title. The other games tested are similar. None of them are running stellar, but they are doing 30fps at medium quality.
For non-gamers, well more and more is making use of the GPU. All that shiny UI stuff is done on the GPU, and all the major browsers are using GPU acceleration. It doesn't take a ton of GPU power, but it needs some.
You mean Apple's AMD 6630M, 6750M, 6770M, 6750, 6770, 6970 will be beat by AMD's 6350/6450. I don't see that happening. You can get discrete graphics on Macs if you want. For budget PCs, integrated graphics has always been a cost saver for Mac and PC. The only models that don't offer discrete are MacBook Airs which have been heavily optimized for weight and power savings. Adding a discrete card makes no sense here.
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
For those of us who need a reminder:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ivy_Bridge_(microarchitecture)
Yeah, it's Wikipedia. But it's short and to the point.
The world is made by those who show up for the job.
I'm curious about this too - I do mostly Java development, so I'll be developing with Eclipse, running a full stack (Apache, JBoss, MySQL and perhaps some other smaller servers), might be doing some GWT development (which at least used to require very fast single-threaded processes, so multi-cores didn't help much - not sure if that's changed).
My current home dev laptop is a Core 2 Duo, so a couple of generations behind. I was wanting to upgrade, but wondering if putting it off until Haswell is available would be worth it, since performance gains (and getting trigate debugged, if necessary) seem like they will be pretty damn significant with that generation.
Or do you think soon-to-be-released Ivy Bridge mobile processors will suffice for that kind of thing?
- Tim
official as in now those sites that got CPU's few months ago are actually allowed to tell you how fast CPU's are, and not end up on black list/in jail
Buy Windows 7 now and you won't have to worry about Windows 8. I am skipping it for Windows 9 hopefully without Metro otherwise 7 will be my last Windows OS.
Ha! I remember waiting for KDE4 to "do the switch". Still running Windows :D
When building a new PC I went for the Pentium G620. It's pretty much the lowest-end Sandy Bridge CPU in existence. I've been running this model for a while now.
With Ivy Bridge coming out, hopefully the prices on Sandy Bridge CPUs will come down. Maybe I could move to an i3 on the cheap, then. Or perhaps I'll even wait for Haswell; Sandy Bridge CPUs will probably be dirt cheap by then.
:(){
I am currently running my main rig built on an Socket 1366 i7-920 (@ 3.8ghz), X58 chipset Rampage II Extreme, and 6gb of tri-channel RAM (Soon to be 12gb). For my investment, it seemed that Intel's "Enthusiast" socket 1366 made all the right choices. The tech was released early, prior to the mainstream socket 1156, was more advanced (tri-channel RAM and X58 allowed for tons of PCI-E lanes and CrossFireX/SLI without having to choose etc...), the X58 boards didn't have all the foulups necessitating multiple revisions and GEN2/GEN3 as in the mainstream, and the i7-920/930 both had similar specs to the 960 extreme edition save for clock speed and all were open to huge boosts when overclocking. Later, the hex-cores came about for those with the $999 to spend and incredible performance. This rig has kept me near the top performance-wise against the entire socket 1156, and 1155 lineup to date - competitive with Sandy Bridge and even Ivy so many years later.
I was actually looking forward to Sandy Bridge-E and the debut of Socket 2011 to be a second generation 1366 but sadly it seemed Intel flipped about-face with everything meaningful. 2011 based builds came out WAY after Sandy Bridge 1155, the processors were incredibly expensive starting at around $400 for a quad and a semi-decent hex was in the $700 range, X78 high end boards proved even more expensive than X58 at launch, leaving the platform a huge investment for the upgrade. Where was the Core i7-920 analog that had the cache, cores, and features of the extreme edition but was clocked lower (leaving plenty of room for OCing up to and beyond EE specs) for the $250-300 mark? Everything they seemed to do right with Nahalem and Socket 1366 as a whole, which has probably been the best platform investment I've made in years, they've scrubbed for what...? Does Intel just want me upgrading more frequently and paying more for the privilege? Do they not want to "hit it out of the park" anymore in favor of small base hits? It seems in bad taste, even more so if it is done because they aren't afraid of AMD's latest crop of CPUs so they figure they can choke out a few minor steps forward and ratchet the price skyward as there are no alternatives
Thus, I passed by SB-E which I hoped to be the next "big" upgrade and looked toward IB-E but things don't bode well. There seems to be little discussion of IB-E and what is mentioned suggests it wont' be launched until very late this year, leaving it to fall in right before Haswell. There are competing reports if Haswell-E will exist on Socket2011 and not require a new socket change as those who are enjoing SB/IB on 1155 will. I hear nothing about pricing, and if SB-E is any indication, it will be another expensive clusterfuck. If anyone as further information as to IB-E, Haswell's Enthusiast socket, or the future of the Enthusiast platform in general I'd appreciate it, but at the moment it doesn't seem promising. I truly hope that Piledriver can provide solid competition for Ivy Bridge in terms of both single/multithreaded performance at "enthusiast/power user" tasks like gaming, coding, content creation etc... as it would be nice to see AMD bring back the whole "5-10% less performance than Intel at a HUGE monetary savings for the processor and platform itself" that brought all my recent builds save my main rig onto Phenom II X4 or X6 BlackEditions, which serve faithfully.
Ivy Bridge being an incremental upgrade isn't necessarily a huge problem, but I worry more about overall pricing of Intel platforms, Socket 2011's IB-E still in question, Haswell,and the future of the Enthusiast socket/platform as a whole.
Core2Due (Q6000) here. Just found out my Asus P5B-Deluxe has at least one bad cap next to one of the PCIe slots. For me, Ivy-Bridge is the holdout. Besides, I prefer a mature platform over a new one. Microcode updates rolled up in the latest BIOS revisions not withstanding.
Life is not for the lazy.
I'm a little out of verse when it comes to these components, but I'm wondering what kind of memory bandwidth a dual channel Z77 board can use compared to my now old X58 triple channel board? A couple of the reviews suggested that at DDR 1600 they're both tied around 20GB/s, which baffles me. Can anyone explain how that could be? Wouldn't an extra channel of memory give you 50% more speed over dual channel?
Perhaps the next iteration, "Poison Ivy," will be the sexy version? The "Poison Ivy" movie girl and 'Poison Ivy' girl from the Batman movie were rather sexy. Or am I just wandering around a dark closet here by myself?
Vote monkeys into Congress. They are cheaper and more trustworthy.
Or Anandtech, I might actually read it.. when someone has been called out as a fraud like Tom (the German military dentist) Pabst has, NOTHING on his site is worth even 5 seconds of my time. Thanks anyways.
it allows using smaller data size operations (for example, 16 bit) on an unsigned data element that is stored in a physically larger space (maybe 64 bit to allow for a large maximum size). Once the numbers in this field outgrow 16 bits, the code to deal with them can be changed to handle 32 and then 64 bit values without actually reformatting the numbers themselves. This is a minor consideration but it is there.
Low order bytes first is also the natural order for performing addition and subtraction (multiplication doesn't care either way). It is no use having the highest order byte in an addition until the lower order bytes have been processed to find the carry status.
To be fair, a reverse argument along those lines could be made - in comparisons, knowing the highest order byte might be enough to decide the comparison. I'm not sure, but division might also prefer high byte first.
There is only one long term strategy; If it still does the job, run it until it dies, then replace it. If it doesn't do the job, upgrade. My Q6600 still does the job; I boot to Windows 7 / Mint in under a minute, games perform well at my monitors native resolution. I don't sit idly by while video is transcoding / running long processes anyway, so how fast unattended workloads take makes no difference.
When it dies, I'll do the whole thing again. I'll keep the graphics card (replaced due to hardware failure), but the rest will be scrapped. I couldn't buy an LGA775 processor to replace it now if I wanted to.
Finally had enough. Come see us over at https://soylentnews.org/
Core2Due (Q6000) here. Just found out my Asus P5B-Deluxe has at least one bad cap next to one of the PCIe slots. For me, Ivy-Bridge is the holdout. Besides, I prefer a mature platform over a new one. Microcode updates rolled up in the latest BIOS revisions not withstanding.
Or, you can just replace the cap...
Also comes with a NEW socket, 1150.
Thanks Intel Jerks. Can you not design a new socket every 2 years please.
Basically if I upgrade this year I am stuck with it. Owning a Desktop should make it easier to upgrade! When I have to buy all new MB, Ram, CPU, etc every couple of years you are kind of defeating the whole purpose.
Now I have to decide if I want to wait an entire year for Haswell to come out or not (assuming it isn't delayed etc...)
The release of Ivy is a "Tick" in Intel's "Tick Tock" release strategy. It's not meant to be a massive increase in processor speed but instead introduces a new platform: their 22nm 3D tri-gate transistor technology.
Oh, it's still doing the job.
This is my attempt to do some rough prelim research to have a strategy on hand when it DOES die. I consider myself fortunate that my custom built comp is going on 7 years now, that's pretty good for the life of a comp. Meanwhile in OS land, I'm seeing all the long brewing warnings of XP fading from support. And slow bits of feature-support are being nudged from XP.
That's why I don't trust Win 8 Metro, it's MS's version of Negative-Tick -> Positive Tock, my emergency plan is Win7 because at work I had the chance to thoroughly pound it and maybe excepting whatever weird DRM horror stories were going on with Vista back in the day, it will do. But since I totally don't trust Metro, and given MS's Now Now Now marketing, it feels at risk to be another Zune, I want to see what the Post Win-8-Metro fallout becomes, and that's about as good as I'll get. By then it will be some 2013, and I'll admit with anyone that's about time to get serious preparing for a successor path. I have a good chance of making it - my buddy who built this comp urged me to spend about another $300 in "invisible quality components" to avoid the cheap fail points known on the Dell/other Price-Slicer-Specials, and basically I'm satisfied. Lemme squeak another 2 years out of this beast and then I'll be fairly satisfied. ... But I DO need that 2 years perspective, I'm so feeling like on the Early-Zune Whitewash, I can't see what lies beyond Win-8 yet.
My first Journal Entry ever, in 8 years! http://slashdot.org/journal/365947/aphelion-scifi-fantasy-horror-poetry-webzine