UPCOMING TECHNOLOGY – Following the Moore’s law and keeping it consistent with time, Intel is ready to ship the next generation of processors on the Mobile, Desktop and Notebook platforms. Code named Sandy bridge, this processor is packed with fully integrated GPU(Graphic Processing Unit), LLC(last level cache), media controllers and processor cores onto one silicon chip.
Sandy Bridge is not to be considered as an innovation in the x86 family, it’s rather an extension of the first generation of core processors “Nehalem“, includes a graphics core on the same silicon piece of the i3/5/7 CPUs. Sandy bridge is based on the 32nm manufacturing process and built to squeeze out more energy and performance improvements over the current range of Intel chipsets. Sandy Bridge is more about it’s architecture and the integration of GPU. With integrating the GPU onto the processor, it’s a significant improvement to Intel’s current line of processor architecture boosting performance and better energy consumption habits. Intel also plans to target the mainstream market first before catering the other market niches.
MaximumPC provided a table of benchmarks comparing the application load time on Sandy Bridge’s variants with the AMD’s Phenom processor. (As tested on 64-bit Windows 7 Professional, 4GB of RAM DDR3/1333 (for the dual-core chips) or 6GB of DDR3/1333 (for the tri-channel chips), a Western Digital Raptor 150 10,000rpm hard drive, a GeForce GTX 285, and the same graphics driver for all of the test configurations):
| 3.4GHz Core i7-2600K | 2.66GHz Core i5-750 | 2.8GHz Core i7-860 | 2.93GHz Core i7-870 | 3.33GHz Core i7-975 Extreme Edition | 3.33GHz Core i7-980X | 3.2GHz Phenom II X6 1090T | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Premiere Pro CS3 (sec) | 453 | 615 | 581 | 539 | 504 | 453 | 749 |
| Sony Vegas Pro 9.0c (sec) | 3,007 | 4,899 | 3,863 | 3,531 | 3,244 | 2,675 | 5,010 |
| HandBrake DVD to iPhone (sec) | 1,298 | 1,702 | 1,360 | 1,247 | 1,170 | 941 | 1,580 |
| MainConcept 1.6 (sec) | 2,134 | 3,092 | 2,735 | 2,486 | 2,308 | 1,827 | 2,816 |
| Cinebench 10 64-bit | 23,259 | 14,455 | 17,516 | 19,197 | 20,147 | 27,479 | 17,892 |
| Cinebench 11.5 64-bit | 6.87 | 3.83 | 5.15 | 5.54 | 5.99 | 8.92 | 5.67 |
| POV Ray 3.7 | 4,979 | 2,810 | 3,883 | 4,497 | 4,236 | 6,557 | 4,656.5 |
| Photoshop CS3 (sec) | 89 | 118 | 123 | 100 | 91 | 89 | 130 |
| Adobe Lightroom 2.6 (sec) | 394 | 603 | 469 | 422 | 418 | 419 | 426 |
| ProShow Producer 4 (sec) | 1,007 | 1,425 | 1,382 | 1,290 | 1,208 | 1,092 | 1,669 |
| Bibble 5.02 (sec) | 121 | 186 | 142 | 122 | 120 | 97.2 | 145 |
| PCMark Vantage 64-bit Overall | 11,250 | 8,504 | 8,903 | 9,120 | 9,260 | 10,470 | 7,481 |
| Fritz Chess Benchmark (KiloNodes/s) | 13,017 | 8,407 | 10,997 | 11,995 | 12,738 | 12,733 | 11,219 |
| Valve Map Compilation (sec) | 76 | 110 | 116 | 106 | 100 | 99 | 132 |
| Everest Ultimate MEM Copy (MB/s) | 16,994 | 15,445 | 15,372 | 14,693 | 17,712 | 13,086 | 11,043 |
| Everest Ultimate MEM Latency (ns) | 36 | 54.3 | 49.5 | 52.5 | 59.8 | 61.3 | 51.6 |
| SiSoft Sandra RAM Bandwidth (GB/s) | 16 | 17 | 17 | 17 | 23 | 20 | 13 |
| 3DMark Vantage CPU | 53,599 | 44,594 | 46,064 | 48,816 | 51,321 | 62,893 | 44,587 |
| Valve Particle test (fps) | 180 | 111 | 148 | 159 | 174 | 259 | 120 |
| Resident Evil 5 / low-res (fps) | 132 | 110.3 | 115.9 | 126.6 | 130.7 | 134.1 | 100.3 |
| World in Conflict / low-res (fps) | 306 | 256 | 253 | 253 | 317 | 358 | 162 |
| Dirt 2 / low-res (fps) | 162 | 155 | 94 | 153.3 | 157 | 155.7 | 121 |
| Far Cry 2 / low-res (fps) | 165 | 146.53 | 150.2 | 153.3 | 158.2 | 158.6 | 99 |
Clearly, the benchmarks announce Intel Cores as winners.
Intel is yet to go full fledged with the sales of Sandy bridge powered computers. It’s fair to consider “Sandy Bridge” as the next obvious move by Intel in it’s chipset development timeline. Something not to be considered very impressive. It offers outstanding performance and better energy efficiency with lesser number of hardware dependencies as compared to it’s previous generation. A quirky move by Intel to its second generation of core processors will definitely have a unpleasant effect on the Intel worshipping-over-clocker community.
Leave a Reply