Intel Ivy Bridge benchmarks leak

Ivy Bridge is on its way. For the uninformed, that's the codename of the latest iteration of Intel processors, a die-shrink of the company's current Sandy Bridge lineup that blends higher performance – including new integrated graphics support for DirectX 11 – with lower power use. And did we say higher performance? Intel's previously hinted that Ivy Bridge's graphical prowess could be up to 60 percent higher than the chips' sandy predecessors.

AnandTech got its hands on a leaked roadmap of all the Ivy Bridge chips that are expected to hit in 2012 – April, say the current predictions – and the listed, mainstream processors number eight in total. Six quad-core, i5-branded chips can be found in the lineup, ranging from the 3.0-GHz i5-3330 on the lowest end all the way up to the 3.4-GHz i5-3570K on the highest. All of the i5 chips, save for the i5-3330, can Turbo Boost their clock speeds up by 0.4 GHz when necessary, whereas the i5-3330 can only jump from 3.0 GHz to 3.2 GHz.

The only unlocked processor in the Ivy Bridge i5 lineup is the aforementioned i5-3570K, meaning that aspiring overclockers will have to settle for fiddling around with the processor's Base Clock instead of hacking away at the chip's multiplier. And none of the i5-series chips support Intel's hyperthreading, a split of the chip's four physical cores into eight virtual cores within the operating system.

That's where the final two consumer chips in the Ivy Bridge lineup come into play. The i7-3770 and its unlocked variant, the i7-3770K, start with clock speeds at at 3.4- and 3.5-GHz respectively. Both run up to eight virtual cores as part of Intel's hyperthreading, and both can Turbo Boost up to a clock speed of 3.9 GHz when a user needs the extra "oomph." As well, the HD4000 GPU makes its home on both i7 chips (and can also be found in the i5-3570-K as well), a beefier graphics processor than the HD2500 GPU found on the five other i5 chips.

Specs notwithstanding, how does Ivy Bridge stack up in the Intel world? Xbit-labs got its hands on some of Intel's internal benchmark slides, which first compare the performance of an Ivy Bridge Intel Core i7-3770 processor against a similarly configured Sandy Bridge chip, the Intel Core i7-2600. The upshot? Anywhere from seven to 25 percent improvements in CPU-driven performance, depending on the particular application, and a roaring 192-percent increase on the combined CPU and GPU 3DMark Vantage benchmark (on the benchmark's overall score).

This article, written by David Murphy, originally appeared on PCMag.com and is republished on Gear Live with the permission of Ziff Davis, Inc.