ChrisMorley
01-16-2011, 11:49 PM
I feel like I’ve talked about Sandy Bridge so much over the past couple of months I’m almost too burned out to do this post. But you know what, I need to share this information with you. It’s exciting, it’s refreshing, and it greatly impacts what we are doing as a company and the products we are offering to you.
In case you haven’t heard, Intel dropped a thermo-nuclear warhead on the CPU industry with their latest “tock” in their “tick tock” strategy. Tock rhymes with "Rock" and that's what a "Tock" is supposed to be. The last "Tock" was Nahelem. Their second generation Core i7 technology brings a lot of “firsts” and “new” to both Intel’s lineup and the industry as a whole.
There are a lot of websites I’d recommend for a technical deep-dive, if you’re interested in the nitty gritty. I’m not going to go over what others have covered so thoroughly. I suggest you check out Anand’s review (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested) for starters.
The bottom line is this: Sandy Bridge runs cooler, quieter, and is so loaded with advanced technologies, features, overclocking capabilities, and stratified performance up and down the price/performance stack that we have dropped AMD and Intel’s own X58 platform for our consumer desktops.
Intel has awkwardly tried to position this product as a replacement for their previous “mainstream” platform, the P55 chipset and its subsequent Socket 1156 processors. Indeed, in the hundreds of slides and whitepapers I read, not once did they compare it to the X58 platform.
But when I got my hands on Sandy Bridge and put it up against our hands-down best selling processor, the Core i7 950 – I was blown away.
It runs incredibly cooler and quieter, brings more performance and performance headroom, and is less expensive as a platform and as a processor than the i7 950 (and if you read the reviews, even an i7 975 Extreme Edition). In fact, the one and only one reason to buy an X58 platform is if you are interested in getting a 6-core for some hard core video transcoding/encoding. And in that case, we’ve kept the X58 platform around with the Quantum SHIFT for creative professionals.
The fact is that Sandy Bridge is the smart choice for the consumer, and it doesn’t matter if you’re spending $1000 or $10,000.
Let me get you started with some performance benchmarks I ran. Please excuse my being coy on the actual numbers behind this. Sometimes we feel like we do R&D for the rest of this industry, and so this time I’m not showing the exact results – but the bars in these graphs are all backed by hard numbers. The Core i7 950 was the gold standard for our testing, so you can see how Sandy Bridge falls in line.
CINEBENCH MULTI-THREADED RENDERING
http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/7719/cinebench115.png
Starting with Cinebench, to show great multi-threaded performance in a content-creation environment, you’ll see explosive numbers out of the 2600K, with the 2500K just being edged out by the i7 950 and X6 1090T.
CINEBENCH SINGLE THREADED RENDERING
http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/9683/cinebench10single.png
Keeping those processors in their place let’s switch to the single threaded performance results in Cinebench R10. Without the brute force of 6 cores behind it, you can see that the X6 1090T takes a dive, and the Athlon II X3 isn’t even getting up off the bench. Furthermore, every single Sandy Bridge processor outclasses the Core i7 950 in single threaded operations.
X264 HD PASS 2 VIDEO ENCODING
http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/415/x264hd.png
Moving on to video encoding, it’s almost a mirrored performance by these professors from our Cinebench R11.5 muli-threaded test, with the 2600K the clear winner.
TOTAL PLATFORM PERFORMANCE WITH PC MARK VANTAGE
http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/4910/pcmarkvantage.png
See, this is where it starts to get interesting – when you stop focusing 100% on the multithreaded capabilities of a processor, and start to factor in the whole platform solution. As you can see, Sandy Bridge really just is in a class of its own for general usage – from multi-tasking to photo manipulation, to gaming – all taken into account in this test – Sandy Bridge just walks away from it.
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/640/powerg.png
But to put all of that in perspective, take a look at how little that performance costs you in terms of power draw. All else being equal the performance of Sandy Bridge is excellent, but to do so well at such low power consumption and consequently lower temps and noise is a tremendous feat.
CONCLUSION
As you can see it’s the 2500K at two thirds the price of the i7 950 that is giving the 950 a hard time. The 2600K enjoys a sizeable lead. The Athlon II X3 can’t seem to even step up to the fight with the lowest end Core i3 2100, and the big daddy Phenom II X6 1090T is simply outclassed by the 2600K and can’t deliver the single threaded or platform performance of either the 2500K or Core i7 950. It also doesn’t have the total performance package when you stop focusing on its multi-core prowess, and its power consumption doesn’t do it any favors, either.
It's one thing to run the numbers, it's another thing to experience each of these configurations in sequence, getting to feel the snap, if you will. And when you really put these configurations under load, and hear the fans rev up, feel the heat from the voltage regulators, and see the power consumption, it really puts things into perspective. Sandy Bridge put these numbers up there inaudibly, with a heat sink that felt almost cool to the touch, and near the idle wattage numbers of some previous generation platforms.
Combine that with the price, the scalable platform from inexpensive and integrated all the way up to 3-way SLI overclocking monstrosities, and you can see why we're excited. And hopefully this gives you a little more of a glimpse as to why we've choses to standardize our consumer lineup on Sandy Bridge. It just makes sense. We'll still offer X58 and six-core, along with dual Xeons on our Quantum SHIFT - but if you're in the market for a new home PC, for any reason, get Sandy Bridge.
In case you haven’t heard, Intel dropped a thermo-nuclear warhead on the CPU industry with their latest “tock” in their “tick tock” strategy. Tock rhymes with "Rock" and that's what a "Tock" is supposed to be. The last "Tock" was Nahelem. Their second generation Core i7 technology brings a lot of “firsts” and “new” to both Intel’s lineup and the industry as a whole.
There are a lot of websites I’d recommend for a technical deep-dive, if you’re interested in the nitty gritty. I’m not going to go over what others have covered so thoroughly. I suggest you check out Anand’s review (http://www.anandtech.com/show/4083/the-sandy-bridge-review-intel-core-i7-2600k-i5-2500k-core-i3-2100-tested) for starters.
The bottom line is this: Sandy Bridge runs cooler, quieter, and is so loaded with advanced technologies, features, overclocking capabilities, and stratified performance up and down the price/performance stack that we have dropped AMD and Intel’s own X58 platform for our consumer desktops.
Intel has awkwardly tried to position this product as a replacement for their previous “mainstream” platform, the P55 chipset and its subsequent Socket 1156 processors. Indeed, in the hundreds of slides and whitepapers I read, not once did they compare it to the X58 platform.
But when I got my hands on Sandy Bridge and put it up against our hands-down best selling processor, the Core i7 950 – I was blown away.
It runs incredibly cooler and quieter, brings more performance and performance headroom, and is less expensive as a platform and as a processor than the i7 950 (and if you read the reviews, even an i7 975 Extreme Edition). In fact, the one and only one reason to buy an X58 platform is if you are interested in getting a 6-core for some hard core video transcoding/encoding. And in that case, we’ve kept the X58 platform around with the Quantum SHIFT for creative professionals.
The fact is that Sandy Bridge is the smart choice for the consumer, and it doesn’t matter if you’re spending $1000 or $10,000.
Let me get you started with some performance benchmarks I ran. Please excuse my being coy on the actual numbers behind this. Sometimes we feel like we do R&D for the rest of this industry, and so this time I’m not showing the exact results – but the bars in these graphs are all backed by hard numbers. The Core i7 950 was the gold standard for our testing, so you can see how Sandy Bridge falls in line.
CINEBENCH MULTI-THREADED RENDERING
http://img88.imageshack.us/img88/7719/cinebench115.png
Starting with Cinebench, to show great multi-threaded performance in a content-creation environment, you’ll see explosive numbers out of the 2600K, with the 2500K just being edged out by the i7 950 and X6 1090T.
CINEBENCH SINGLE THREADED RENDERING
http://img138.imageshack.us/img138/9683/cinebench10single.png
Keeping those processors in their place let’s switch to the single threaded performance results in Cinebench R10. Without the brute force of 6 cores behind it, you can see that the X6 1090T takes a dive, and the Athlon II X3 isn’t even getting up off the bench. Furthermore, every single Sandy Bridge processor outclasses the Core i7 950 in single threaded operations.
X264 HD PASS 2 VIDEO ENCODING
http://img220.imageshack.us/img220/415/x264hd.png
Moving on to video encoding, it’s almost a mirrored performance by these professors from our Cinebench R11.5 muli-threaded test, with the 2600K the clear winner.
TOTAL PLATFORM PERFORMANCE WITH PC MARK VANTAGE
http://img233.imageshack.us/img233/4910/pcmarkvantage.png
See, this is where it starts to get interesting – when you stop focusing 100% on the multithreaded capabilities of a processor, and start to factor in the whole platform solution. As you can see, Sandy Bridge really just is in a class of its own for general usage – from multi-tasking to photo manipulation, to gaming – all taken into account in this test – Sandy Bridge just walks away from it.
http://img709.imageshack.us/img709/640/powerg.png
But to put all of that in perspective, take a look at how little that performance costs you in terms of power draw. All else being equal the performance of Sandy Bridge is excellent, but to do so well at such low power consumption and consequently lower temps and noise is a tremendous feat.
CONCLUSION
As you can see it’s the 2500K at two thirds the price of the i7 950 that is giving the 950 a hard time. The 2600K enjoys a sizeable lead. The Athlon II X3 can’t seem to even step up to the fight with the lowest end Core i3 2100, and the big daddy Phenom II X6 1090T is simply outclassed by the 2600K and can’t deliver the single threaded or platform performance of either the 2500K or Core i7 950. It also doesn’t have the total performance package when you stop focusing on its multi-core prowess, and its power consumption doesn’t do it any favors, either.
It's one thing to run the numbers, it's another thing to experience each of these configurations in sequence, getting to feel the snap, if you will. And when you really put these configurations under load, and hear the fans rev up, feel the heat from the voltage regulators, and see the power consumption, it really puts things into perspective. Sandy Bridge put these numbers up there inaudibly, with a heat sink that felt almost cool to the touch, and near the idle wattage numbers of some previous generation platforms.
Combine that with the price, the scalable platform from inexpensive and integrated all the way up to 3-way SLI overclocking monstrosities, and you can see why we're excited. And hopefully this gives you a little more of a glimpse as to why we've choses to standardize our consumer lineup on Sandy Bridge. It just makes sense. We'll still offer X58 and six-core, along with dual Xeons on our Quantum SHIFT - but if you're in the market for a new home PC, for any reason, get Sandy Bridge.