Intel Ivy Bridge spotted in the wild and benched

With Intel’s Sandy Bridge-E CPU just hitting the market, we’ve got a sneak-peak into the performance of their upcoming Ivy Bridge processors that’ll be based on the 22nm fabrication process. Chinese website, Coolaler managed to get their hands on an early engineering sample of a quad-core Ivy Bridge CPU. The processor was running on a Gigabyte Z68X-UD7-B3 motherboard with the latest F9 BIOS update. The CPU itself is not a very high-end as it doesn’t seem to support HyperThreading and runs at just 2.0GHz. It does support TurboBoost, which is evident from the CPU’s screenshot, but the boost isn’t very significant, which could suggest that it’s a Core i5 variant of Ivy Bridge. The best part is the TDP, which is just 65W, thanks to the smaller fabrication process.

Shaping up well

Coming to the performance, we only have AIDA64’s Cache and Memory benchmark to go by and from this, the performance is more or less similar to Sandy Bridge. Remember though, the CPU was tested on a BIOS not optimized for Ivy Bridge and software that hasn’t been updated to take real advantage of the new CPU, so once it does launch, it could be a very different picture. It seems like Intel will be concentrating more on the power consumption of the new chips rather than performance. Sandy Bridge, with their 32nm fabrication, has already shown a big leap over its predecessor and Ivy Bridge will certainly have small performance boosts, but the emphasis will be on the low power draw. This is actually a good thing since lower power usually means more headroom for overclocking. Also, given the fact that Ivy Bridge will work perfectly on Socket 1155, it’s safe to go ahead with your upgrade right now and sometime next year, if you feel you need more power, you simply change the CPU rather than the whole set.

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