14 DAY TRIAL // Despite the fact that more than a month separates us from the official launch of Intel’s Ivy Bridge processors, benchmarks of an upcoming Core i7-3610QM notebook processor have recently made their appearance online.
The tests, which were published by Donanim Haber, show Intel’s CPU running Super Pi, as well as CineBench R11.5, two benchmarks that are well known to hardware enthusiasts.
While the former is of little use when it comes to testing the performance of modern multi-core chips, Cinebench is one of the most representative benchmarks around, since it tests the rendering power of the CPU.
The good news for Intel is that, in Cinebench R11.5, the Core i7-3610QM proves to be faster than quite a few other processors, including AMD’s FX-8150, which according to Donanim Haber scores between 5.90 and 5.95 points in the same benchmark.
The Core i7-3610QM sports quad processing cores with Hyper-Threading support that have a base clock speed of 2.3GHz and a maximum 3.3GHz Turbo Boost frequency.
The chip also includes 6MB of Level 3 cache memory, as well as an Intel HD 4000 on-die GPU, all packed inside a 45 Watt thermal envelope.
Ivy Bridge is the code name used for the 22nm die shrink of the current Sandy Bridge chips, and features basically the same architecture, but with a few minor tweaks and improvements.
This includes a new on-die GPU that will come with full DirectX 11 support, as well as with 30% more EUs than Sandy Bridge, in order to offer up to 60% faster performance than current Core CPUs, according to Intel.
In addition, the processor cores have also received some minor tweaks, as their AVX performance was slightly increased and Intel has updated the integrated PCI Express controller to the 3.0 standard. The chips are expected to debut on April 29.
