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Official Ivy Bridge Benchmarks

Intel has been sending information to its partners in the form of benchmarks about its new Ivy Bridge processors. As usual its good news for Intel but bad news for AMD. Not only has Ivy Bridge taken about a 10-15% improvement in CPU performance over the previous Sandy Bridge generation but the Integrated graphics have taken a huge leap forward of between 30 and 200% depending on the application. Intel also boasts a 25% improvement in everyday applications like Microsoft Office Excel 2010 as well as 15% improved 3D rendering capabilities in Cinebench. The benchmark is a cross generational comparison between the i7 2600 and the i7 3770. Both have 4 cores, 8 threads, 8MB of L3 cache and run at 3.4GHz.

+7% higher overall SYSmark 2012 score
+14% higher overall HDXPRT 2011 score
+15% higher Cinebench 11.5 score
+13% better ProShow Gold 4.5 result
+25% faster performance in Excel 2010
+56% faster performance in ArcSoft Media Expresso
+192% higher overall 3DMark Vantage score
+17% faster performance in 3DMark Vantage CPU benchmark
+199% faster performance in 3DMark Vantage GPU benchmark

The new Ivy Bridge processors are due out next year in March to May. Meaning they will probably arrive about a month or two before Windows 8 which sadly means they will not be supporting the latest DX 11.1 revision but they will meet the DX 11 (.0) requirements. The key changes with Ivy Bridge are as follows:

Shrunk 22nm (from 32nm) manufacturing process
Enhanced AVX acceleration
Integrated graphics performance improved by 30% compared to its predecessor (in reality gains can be as much as 200%)
Integrated graphics support DX11 and OpenCL 1.1
PCI Express 3.0 x16 interface, including a PCI Express 2.0 x4 controller

Source: Xbit Labs