Intel Officially Lifts the Veil On Ivy Bridge 200
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.
Review Roundup (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Let me get this straight... (Score:5, Informative)
For people familiar with Intel's Tick-Tock cadence - this should not come as much surprise. Some people may have gotten caught up in marketing and expected more, but this is a "Tick" which brings a process shrink, power savings, and a modest performance increase. It is just about delivering that, though perhaps on the softer side of things.
Sandy Bridge was a Tock - a BIG performance improvement. Haswell should be a Tock - a BIG performance improvement.
On the tick, they set more modest performance goals, and focus on getting the process shrink right and tuning things up. On the tock, they should knock our socks off. So maybe Ivy Bridge is disappointing, but perhaps familiarity with their product development strategy helps to manage expectations
Re:HD 4000 (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Let me get this straight... (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Let me get this straight... (Score:5, Informative)
No, Tocks (Penryn, Nehalem, SandyB, Haswell) are new architecture, Ticks (Merom, Westmere, IvyBridge, Haswell-sucessor-on-next-gen-XXnm-process) are updated architecture on new process.
Re:Let me get this straight... (Score:4, Informative)
Yes, IB isn't a massive improvement on SB. But it's also worth stating what Intel did right:
Same price
Compatible with old sockets/motherboards
And who said every generation of processors had to be a significant improvement? Toyota puts out essentially the same car every year for a decade, with only minor, incremental improvements. There's no reason why you can't do the same for processors. The only downside is for people who like to brag about having the very-latest processor.
Personally, I'm going to be grabbing an Ivy Bridge laptop, if only because my old, reliable Core 2 laptop finally died. And I'll probably skip over Haswell, maybe Broadwell too, before upgrading again.
Long story short, if you've got a Sandy Bridge, you don't need to upgrade yet. If you've got a Nehalem and some spare cash, an upgrade may (or may not) be useful. If you're on something before that, IB is the chip to upgrade to.
PS: I'm not really a fanboy for either company (I've used both extensively - the Phenom's were great, and even my old Athlon 900 still sees service now and again), but AMD really doesn't have any attractive higher-end options. The Fusion processors look good compared to Intel's low-power options, though - I seriously considered getting a small Fusion laptop and then building a more powerful SB or IB desktop at home, but decided single-device was better.
Re:Let me get this straight... (Score:5, Informative)
Except the summary seems wrong by its own sources:
TechSpot
Since late last year Ivy Bridge seems to be the architecture everyone is waiting for. Although Intel is only anticipating a 10–15% processing performance bump when compared to Sandy Bridge,
Which is what they have been saying for about a year now, and what everyone expected. And for the record, 15% speed boost at the same clock with lower power usage is not insignificant, at all.
AnandTech:
Ivy Bridge is a tick+, as we've already established. ... The end result is a reasonable increase in CPU performance (for a tick), a big step in GPU performance, and a decrease in power consumption.
SemiAccurate:
For raw numbers, the top HD 4000 only has 16 shaders, but the underlying architecture is completely new. .....Intel is claiming about 2x the graphics performance from 33% more units. We don't think these claims are out of line for the general case.
Way to go, summary, you successfully implied that the chip was a flop when your sources indicate it hit its target, has substantially better GPU performance, and has a launch price in line with its current lineup. Slashdot truly is master of the art of spin.
Re:Let me get this straight... (Score:4, Informative)
Leakage was handled in several ways. Materials technology in semiconductor manufacturing (in particular CPU manufacturing) advanced a lot in the last decade and a half. It used to be chips were all made from polysilicon. Eventually as the transistors got smaller closer to the nanoscale there was work done on new materials (so called low-k and high-k materials). You probably heard about names such as Black Diamond low-k or Hafnium high-k (aka metal gates) along the way. These reduced the leakage issue. Instead of using aluminum for the wires today we use copper to reduce power consumption because copper is a better conductor. Then there is germanium doping to produce so called 'strained silicon' so that the silicon atoms are further apart to improve electron mobility. Taking these material changes and a couple of design changes today's processors are clocking higher than they were 10 years ago even if not at the rate Intel used to predict back then. You probably noticed by now we are either hitting or close to hitting 4 GHz on CPUs while not so long ago they used to be 2 GHz or less with regular air cooling.
Today people are either doing chip stacking (e.g. on cellphones it is common to stack the DRAM and Flash on top of the CPU module) to make the system more compact. Then there are people working on so called vertical transistors and trigate transistors instead of using regular planar transistors. Ivy Bridge for example is the first processor featuring trigate transistors which is one reason for its low power consumption and reduced leakage over Sandy Bridge. It has been more trouble than usual but it seems everything is ok for the next two process shrinks to work in technological terms. Ultimately we will see the whole system on a chip and CPU/GPU integration is simply the first step with DRAM probably following soon afterwards.