Has Ivy Bridge lived up to expectations

[richag]

a little while ago i was going to buy a new PC and was holding out for the Ivy Bridge Chips to be rolled out. well a house purchase but the brakes on that but i am now in a situation where i can think about buying again. so the question is was Ivy Bridge worth the wait and did it provide the jump expected in terms of performance?

[Buzz]

Not in my opinion and with the release of Haswell this time next year I doubt it ever will.

Turbo Boost 2.0 for dynamic hands-off overclocking, Quick Sync Video for speedier video transcoding, and so on also applies now on Ivy as did on Sandy. The processing die shrink from 32nm to 22nm being the biggest change.

"Ivy Bridge is faster—but just a little. Performance generally improves more between "ticks" and "tocks" than between "tocks" and "ticks," and you can see this in the relationship between Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge. In our testing, for example, an Intel Core i7-3770K Ivy Bridge processor earned in our CineBench R11.5 multicore rendering test a score of 1.65, compared with a Core i7-2700K in the same system earning 1.58. The chips' scores in PCMark 7 (3,679 versus 3,867) and times in Adobe Photoshop CS5 (2 minutes 47 seconds versus 2:50) and Handbrake 0.9.6 (32 seconds versus 31 seconds) also bear this out. So you will see speed bumps, but they'll be small this time around. Chances are, however, that next year's "tock" will boost the speeds of new processors considerably more."

[richag]

Thanks Buzz so really it is just a normal increase that you would expect from a new processor series

[dangro474]

Honestly I never expected there to be a huge difference between Ivy and Sandy.

The jump from 1st gen to Sandy was quite substantial, however as the ivy bridge equivalent to their sandy bridge counterpart is almost identically priced, there isn't really any reason to opt for Sandy instead of Ivy, unless an alternative chassis is limited to Sandy Bridge CPU's.

[Enazel]

Pretty much as I expected, a small increase in speed for the same price. Intel works on a tick / tock development system, and this was only ever going to be a small improvement.

[iBushay]

with the processing shrink for 32nm to 22nm it means ivy bridge processors get a lot hotter, personally prefer sandy bridge, the i7 2700k isn't far behind the i7 3770k in terms of processing power and while the 3770k struggles to maintain stability at oc speeds of over 5ghz, the sandy bridge 2700k can reach like 5.2ghz.

ivy bridge has the better hd graphics but with a gpu being used it doesn't make a difference anyway.

for the price difference I would still rather get a sandy bridge, especially for gaming.

[keynes]

with the processing shrink for 32nm to 22nm it means ivy bridge processors get a lot hotter, personally prefer sandy bridge, the i7 2700k isn't far behind the i7 3770k in terms of processing power and while the 3770k struggles to maintain stability at oc speeds of over 5ghz, the sandy bridge 2700k can reach like 5.2ghz.

ivy bridge has the better hd graphics but with a gpu being used it doesn't make a difference anyway.

for the price difference I would still rather get a sandy bridge, especially for gaming.

If you plan to overclock yes but for gaming I would prefer the ivy bridge, it also supports PCI-Express 3.0.

[Frank100]

Hi,

Ivy bridge is going to be about for a little while. They will move to Ivy bridge Xeon processors sometime next year. I'm personally waiting for the Ivy bridge equivalent to the E5 2687W.

From a point of view of performance you'd have to say what's driving the markets these days? Cost saving and improved efficiency are very high up that list. With this in mind is it any great surprise that Ivy bridge delivers well on both of these fronts more so than on extra oomph.

[Yamikotai]

with the processing shrink for 32nm to 22nm it means ivy bridge processors get a lot hotter

You mean the opposite, surely? Smaller manufacturing process means there's less resistance on each transistor thus less heat. Yes, Ivy Bridge runs hotter in cases of OCing but that's related to the move to 3D transistors and crappy TIM between the CPU and overplate, not the nm.

[steaky360]

You mean the opposite, surely? Smaller manufacturing process means there's less resistance on each transistor thus less heat. Yes, Ivy Bridge runs hotter in cases of OCing but that's related to the move to 3D transistors and crappy TIM between the CPU and overplate, not the nm.

I'm afraid from what I've read I don't think that is entirely correct. Ivy bridge chips have a higher heat density, although each individual transistor produces less heat there are far more of them packed into a similar area, making the chip comparatively hotter. If Intel improve the TIM between the CPU and heat-sink then it should be easier to cool the chips due to the increased area of the transistors allowing heat to dissipate more freely. The chip itself will not actually be cooler because of the smaller transistors however.

However this obviously has more of an effect when overclocking.

Saying that, I may have misunderstood something but that's my take on it currently.