14 DAY TRIAL // With every day that passes it seems like we get more and more benchmarks of Intel's upcoming Ivy Bridge processors, the latest to make their way on the Web focusing on the chip's performance when paired together with high-end graphics cards.
The few results that were posted on the Cooler forum test an engineering sample Ivy Bridge dual-core CPU with both an Nvidia GeForce GTX 580 and with an AMD Radeon HD 6990 in 3DMark Vantage.
The processor benchmarked is the same one that was used in a previous comparison against Sandy Bridge (link here) and it has a stock clock of 1.8GHz, 4MB of Level 3 cache and it supports Intel's Hyper-Threading technology.
Judging by the results obtained in the benchmark, the Ivy Bridge chip seems to be a bottleneck for both of the graphics cards, but being an engineering sample these kinds of results are to be expected.
The final version of Ivy Bridge will most definitely receive a series of tweaks and performance improvements before it reaches retail in March or April of 2012.
Ivy Bridge is the code name used for the 22nm die shrink of the current Sandy Bridge architecture and features basically the same design, 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 improved performance.
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.
All these changes should deliver quite an important performance boost over Sandy Bridge. This supposition is also confirmed by a series of leaked benchmarks that appeared just yesterday.
