Sandy Bridge-E Benchmarked: Intel Retains the Performance Crown

Posted 11/14/2011 at 10:57am | by Gordon Mah Ung

23

Comments

Print

Application Benchmarks

3DMark2011

3DMark11 is considered a GPU test but its overall score is actually created from "the graphics score, Physics score, and the Combined score using a weighted harmonic mean." That basically means it's still a test that is weighted heavily towards graphics performance. For our test, remember, that we used identical GeForce GTX 580 cards all running the same graphics drivers. In the end, the new Sandy Bridge E part was the fastest, but really, we're not talking by a huge margin because 3DMark11's overall score is so heavily weighted toward the GPU in the slot—not the GPU in the socket. For this run, we run the default standard test which is Performance. Higher is better here.

3DMark11's physics score for the new Sandy Bridge E shows just how heavily weighted it is toward the GPU. The 3DMark11's Physics test "focuses on CPU performance by simulating rigid body physics with a large number of objects. This test runs at a fixed screen resolution for all presets. There is no post processing, volumetric lighting, or tessellation."

Here, Sandy Bridge E simply crushes the competition to dust even smashing its cousin the Core i7-990X to tiny bits which surprised us as both chips have the same core and thread counts. It's quite possible the insane amounts of bandwidth available to the Sandy Bridge E chip accounts for some of this, or its crazy ass big cache. When we get a chance, we'll switch the X79 to dual-channel mode and rerun the test. For now though, Sandy Bridge E stands tall. Higher is better here.

7-Zip

The popular 7-Zip utility features a built-in benchmark utility that measures how fast a processor can compress and decompress a file. The performance is presented as MIPS and you can vary the size of the load and how many threads you want it to use. The number here uses the maximum number of threads available on a processor so for the eight-core FX-8150 ran with eight threads and the six-core, Hyper-Threaded parts ran with 12-threads. We saw both the older Core i7-990X and its replacement run dead even. On the good news for AMD front though, the FX-8150 gets a little payback on the Core i7-2600 by acing it despite the FX-8150 having a lower price. For those hoping to replicate this at home, just fire up 7-Zip and run the benchmark with a 64MB workload and the maximum number of threads your CPU supports. Higher is better here.

Bibble

For our Bibble 5 test, we take a folder of 210 or so RAW/CR2 files shot with a Canon 5D Mark II and output them to JPEG. Bibble has always been a wondrously multi-threaded application and the Sandy Bridge E again is the top performer by a respectable margin. While people have widely dinged the FX-8150 for middling single-threaded chops, the eight-core processor actually pulls dead even with the four-core, Hyper-Threaded Core i7-2600K CPU. That's not a bad showing for the new AMD part at all. We actually tested a number of our benchmarks to make sure disk I/O wasn't hampering them. This unfortunately wasn't one of them (at least this time, we have tested it on an SSD in the past). We'll revisit this with a couple of the chips with the latest generation SSD to make sure I/O isn't hurting the performance of the new Sandy Bridge E part. Lower is better here.

Cinebench

On the Intel side, there's really only two cores in action here: The older Westmere core that's in the Core i7-990X "Gulftown" and the newer Sandy Bridge core that powers both the Core i7-2600K and the Core i7-3960X. Both parts are 32nm but there is a difference under the heat spreader. To try and get an idea of how each core stands on its own, we used Cinebench10 to run a single-threaded render of its benchmark test. Both the Sandy Bridge and Sandy Bridge E parts run away from the older Westmere core chip in the Core i7-990X and are actually pretty close. Why did the Sandy Bridge E part best its cheaper sibling? This can be attributed to the larger cache (15MB in the Core i7-3960X vs. 8MB in the Core i7-2600K) and also the memory bandwidth differences between the quad-channel and dual-channel machines. There is also a slight clock speed difference. The Core i7-3960X Sandy Bridge E part will turbo clock to 3.9GHz while the Core i7-2600K part will turbo up to 3.4GHz. The upshot here is that given the similar clocks under Turbo (assuming Intel hasn't tweaked its Turbo Boost 2.0 even more) the Sandy Bridge E core perform similarly to Sandy Bridge cores with an edge going to the newer chip and its beefed up cache and memory bandwidth. On the AMD front, you can also clearly see what people are concerned about with FX parts. Despite its higher base clock, Turbo Clock, and Maximum Turbo Clock, and larger cache, the older Phenom II X6 breaks even with the newer FX-8150. Higher is better here.

We've said that the older Core i7-990X part is a monster when it comes to 3D rendering so what does that make the newer Core i7-3960X part? Godzilla? Stomping and romping through your 3D renders? Perhaps. Basically, if your time is money and you render for a living, the new Sandy Bridge E is the chip to have. Higher is better here.

The newer Cinebench 11.5 shows a similar advantage for the six-core chips. The Sandy Bridge E chip can even outpace dual-quad core Xeon W5590 chips (that's 16-threads). It easily outpaces its cousin six-core chip. On the AMD front, the FX-8150 doesn't represent well as its score is just barely faster than the older Phenom II X6 chip despite it having eight cores. We suspect that the Cinebench render is heavy on floating point resources which may be a disadvantage to the FX-8150 which features shared floating point units among its eight cores. Higher is better here.