It is no secret that Intel pretty much owns the desktop market. This is not only in terms of performance per watt but in most cases performance Vs. Cost. Their chief rival AMD has had setback after setback which has hobbled their ability to compete. In fact is has gotten so bad that AMD has officially stated that they will no longer compete head to head with Intel in the desktop market (they will continue to make desktop CPUs but are moving more toward mobile CPUs). This is a shame and normally could mean that new products from Intel will slow down along with innovation (nothing makes you invent like real competition). However this has not stopped Intel from pushing out a new line up of Desktop CPUs that fall under the title of Ivy Bridge. Ivy Bridge is the Tick part of Intel’s Tick-Tock strategy where Sandy Bridge was the introduction of the microarchitecture and Ivy Bridge is the official die shrink from 32nm to 22nm. So let’s see what Ivy Bridge brings to the table in the form of the 3rd Generation Core i7 3770k.
Test System and Comments - Our test platform for the Core i7 3770K was Intel’s own DZ77GA-70K (you can read the full review on it here). This is pretty much the reference board for the Z77 chipset so we wanted to use it as our starting point. The rest of the components are ones that we have used in our other tests so we should get good data. We will also be testing the DZ77GA-70K with our Core i7 2600K to give a much clearer representation of performance between the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge on the same platform.
Comments - Ivy Bridge is supposed to bring better encoding support with improve caching, the AVX (Advanced Vector Extensions) and the ability to use the GMA4000 for highly parallel tasks. To test this we are adding a couple new tests such as Adobe Premier Pro CS5 in addition to After Effects and our usual Cyberlink Media Espresso encoding software. We will be adding a few more consumer products to this list as we move forward as well as dropping some of these down to our motherboard testing.
