Clock for Clock: Sandy Bridge vs Ivy Bridge vs Haswell

The last bit of information I wanted to share before getting to our standard benchmarks was to see how the most recent Intel architectures are scaling in terms of IPC – instructions per clock.  To test this, I set our Haswell, Ivy Bridge and Sandy Bridge CPUs to a static clock rate of 3.5 GHz and ran through a handful of tests.  This allows us to see compare equally the last three generations of Intel CPUs.

Our first result, the single threaded Cinebench 11.5 score, shows us some very important information.  Haswell turns out to be just about 5% faster than Ivy Bridge that is just about 4% faster than Sandy Bridge.  The total IPC improvement from SNB to Haswell totals 9% – not bad for an industry that is supposedly stagnant.  If we consider the multi-threaded results, Hawell is about 9% faster than IVB and 13% faster than Sandy Bridge at the same clock speed.

The AES result from TrueCrypt shows a nice jump as the AES-NI implementation has improved significantly in Haswell and gives it a 20% edge.  The average results in other encryption methods shows a 5% edge for Haswell over Ivy Bridge and a 15% performance lead over the Sandy Bridge CPU.

Finally, our x264 benchmark results show a similar 4.5% advantage for Haswell over IVB and a 10.5% edge over Sandy Bridge on the first pass.  Haswell is 11% and 17% faster respectively on the second pass.

 

Obviously, Haswell does improve overall CPU performance by a modest amount running clock for clock.  That is good news as the Haswell Core i7-4770K is basically running at the same clock rates as the Core i7-3770K.

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