Earlier this year, AMD claimed Trinity would offer significant improvements over its current Llano chips : An overall performance increase of up to 25 percent, 50 percent better graphics performance, and double the performance per watt.
Across the web, tech reviewers have been benchmarking an AMD Trinity test laptop featuring the A quad core processor with integrated Radeon HD G graphics to put these claims to the test. Intel is still the market leader in this highly competitive chips race and, unfortunately, going on CPU performance alone, Trinity still lags behind. Of course, they say that with just about every generation of integrated graphics, and it's never quite true. So, how good are the new integrated HD graphics?
Definitely better. If you keep the detail levels turned down, you can get a very playable experience from most current PC games. But, keep in mind the early test systems we have all include very high-end quad-core Core i7 CPUs, which can help in some games. We'll have to wait until we can test midrange Core i3 and Core i5 laptops to see if you can skip the discrete GPU and still play Skyrim on your midprice laptop on these high-end system, Skyrim worked fine at full 1,x1,pixel resolution, but with detail levels set to low.
For a more in-depth look at the HD 's gaming chops, read this detailed analysis. From the vendors we've spoken to, there should be no price difference to consumers once second-gen CPUs are swapped out for third-gen ones.
Does Ivy Bridge improve battery life? After the big leap made by last year's Sandy Bridge Intel chips, both battery life and application performance are in for modest gains. In comparing somewhat similar inch Origin gaming laptops one Ivy Bridge, one Sandy Bridge , we saw a small drop in battery life, but those were both outlier systems with power-hungry overclocked parts.
In comparing two similar Asus N-series laptops, the newer Ivy Bridge version ran for an additional 12 minutes versus minutes. However, keep in mind that we are comparing W hex-core and 95W quad-core; a 77W hex-core part might need lower clock speeds and could perform worse in limited-threaded tasks depending on the Turbo speeds of course.
In general, tasks like video encoding, 3D rendering, and archiving scale well with additional cores, but how many consumers run these tasks on a day-to-day basis? For most consumers, higher frequencies will likely prove far more useful due to the limited multithreading of everyday applications. There is also the AMD point of view. Bulldozer hasn't exactly been a success story and there is no real competition in the high-end CPU market because of that.
Intel could skip Ivy Bridge altogether and their position at the top of the performance charts would still hold. With no real competition, there's no need to push the performance much higher. For example, the now rather "old" Lynnfield i quad-core, no Hyper-Threading is able to surpass the CPU performance of Llano, but that hasn't stopped plenty of people from picking up Llano as an inexpensive solution that provides all the performance needed for most tasks.
When looking at the big picture, there really aren't any compelling reasons why Intel should have gone with hex-core design for Ivy Bridge. Just like the Sandy Bridge vs. Gulftown comparison, IVB vs. SNB-E looks like a good use of market segmentation. Sure, some enthusiasts will argue that having a quad-core CPU is so , but don't let the number of cores fool you. The only thing that and quad-cores share is the core count; otherwise they are very different animals see for example iK vs Q Increasing the frequencies and boosting the clock for clock performance yields increased performance in every CPU bound task, and improving the quality of the on-die graphics helps in other areas.
In contrast, increasing the core count only helps if the software has proper multithreading and can scale to additional cores--both of which are easier said than done. Given all of the possibilities, it would appear that Intel has done the right thing, and in the process there's no need to try and convince consumers into believing that they need more cores than they actually do. Marketing If we look at the situation from the marketing standpoint first, having a hex-core Ivy Bridge die would more or less kill the just released Sandy Bridge E.
Wrap-Up When looking at the big picture, there really aren't any compelling reasons why Intel should have gone with hex-core design for Ivy Bridge. Intel says each of those units are more powerful than before and now supports DirectX 11, including tessellation.
That's enough, Intel says, to see the six-unit HD out perform the old six-unit HD by 10 to 20 per cent. Along with quicker 3D rendering, Intel has given the broader graphics package a polish. The QuickSync video transcode gets a once over for better performance, for instance. Native support for up to three displays is another first.
Which begs the question of whether Ivy Bridge deserves its status as the "3rd Generation" of Intel's Core processors. Intel says it's justified by the major graphics overhaul, but we think it's a pretty odd thing to claim.
It certainly adds to expectations. As you'll see when you peruse the benchmarks, that may not have been wise. Here again, there's a lot of similarity with the existing Sandy Bridge generation. Once again we have Core i5 and i7 chips and as before it's the i5s and i7s you'll be interested in. Similarly, the i5s get four threads from four cores and the i7s four eight threads from four cores thanks to Hyperthreading. At launch, there are nine new models to choose from.
Putting the specialist low-power chips to one side, there are five you need to know about. The fun starts with the Core i, with four cores, 6MB of cache, HD graphics, a base frequency of 3. Next up is the Core i, which ups the clocks to 3. The Core i5 K takes things to 3.
Then there's a pair of i7 models. The i7 hits 3. The Intel Core i7 K ups the base clock to 3. Cross reference the new chips with the old Sandy Bridge processors and you'll see the clockspeeds haven't budged. That's a big disappointment given the hype surrounding Intel's 22nm process and the fact that once again we're not getting extra cores.
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