Jul 4, 2011 20:01 GMT  ·  By

Less than a month after the first pictures of an Ivy Bridge processor made their appearance online, an engineering sample of Intel's upcoming 22nm processors was benchmarked by a Chinese computer enthusiast and compared with a current Core i5-2400 CPU.

The Ivy Bridge chip used for running these tests was clocked at 1.8GHz and features two processing cores with support for Intel's HyperThreading technology.

Each of the two cores were accompanied by 256KB of Level 2 cache memory, while the shared L3 cache contained 4MB of memory.

To make the battle as fair as possible, using the available hardware, the quad-core Core i5-2400 was also clocked at 1.8GHz and both CPUs were then tested with the CineBench R11.5, CPUmark and Super Pi applications.

The final results favored the Sandy Bridge processor, since this managed to win two of the benchmarks run, Super Pi and Cinebench R11.5, with significant better scores (2.61 vs 1.81 points in Cinebench and 20.8 vs 22.2 seconds in Super Pi).

The only application that favored the Ivy Bridge processor was CPUmark, but the score difference was pretty insignificant as the Core i5-2400 received 276 points, while its contender got 278 points.  

   These are, of course, only preliminary results based on an engineering sample and Ivy Bridge should get better once new chip revisions come out.

In addition, it's also important to note that the native quad-core design used by the Core i5-2400 gives it a clear advantage in comparison with a dual-core plus HyperThreading CPU in multi-threaded workloads, such as CineBench R11.5.

Ivy Bridge is the code name used for the 22nm die shrink of the current Sandy Bridge chips and basically features the same architecture, but with a few minor tweaks and improvements. The first chips based on this design are expected to launch in March/April 2012. (via HardwareLuxx)

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