Intel Core i5 Benchmarked

theres a reason why its called "i7".. google it up. its not like its an SKU or something.

Well, I doubt Intel would be stupid enough to create the mayhem of having 2 different sockets for desktop users while using the same branding for both lines of CPUS.

they have done it before... pentium 4 with both 478 and 775 sockets. even overlapped performance on them too.

yes, they had different part numbers, but they were all branded Pentuim 4

I guess more and more people are building their systems, perhaps out of need for customization and to get more bang for the buck. OEMs don't get confused at identical brand names with different part numbers - neither do enthusiasts. Now they're making it a bit easier for the rest of us to avoid mismatched sockets.


Intel are stupid, or consumers are stupid?

People have made this argument a long time, but it's ignorant. That 15-20% performance (which varies really between 0% and 50%), you can't get without exotic cooling that would cost even more than the price premium on the i7. A BMW costs 2x a Camry and doesn't drive 2x as fast or have 2x the HP, yet BMW is still very much in business.

Some of us do have yearly IT budgets of $3k or more, which is usually 3-6 weeks of pay. What do you propose, that we add mainstream parts to our systems every month? Run 4 average computers and try to bounce our work among them? Can you imagine the configuration nightmare? IT would envelop our spare time. We wouldn't get to know our hardware well at all.

Those with high computing budgets are a small population. But do you think making 100,000 i7's (as they reportedly did) would be near enough to satisfy the mainstream market? Of course not. They release technology a few months ahead of its time and work with us (developers, end-users, admins) to squeeze out the bugs and optimize performance before an even more massive release. It doesn't matter whether we're after bragging rights, getting a critical task done first in line, or just looking for envy when others with mainstream systems discover they don't have the oomph to catch up. The business model has worked for a long time; ask questions about why instead of calling it impossible.

Since when are the prices of Qxxxx's dropping like a rock? Q6600 just got $10 more expensive lol.

But wouldn't that make Intel smart? If they can successfully milk the same cash cow over and over, that's downright brilliant.

After seeing those "benches" the other day, Im wondering what all the i7 gamers are going to think when i5 comes along and kills their precious i7s? And for a few hundred $ less?

I'm not quite sure how you get that the i5 will "kill" the i7 out of those benches, as my i7 destroys the shown score in every case. In Cinebench 64 bit for example, I get over 22k, while the i5 is shown at 12,523. That same margin of victory is true in basically all of the benchmarks they showed.

1) i7 is out now, can't buy i5 yet
2) i5 probably can't SLI/Xfire nearly as well. At least with a Q9xxx, you can move from a P35 to an X38/X48 board.
3) i5 isn't out yet; how do we know so much about bclk/multiplier headroom?

Gaming will be better on the i5s. People have already done tests and show i5 as faster. Have you checked XS? http://www.xtremesystems.org/forums/showthread.php?t=21...

How could gaming be faster on the i5 when it is quite literally slower than the i7 in every way? It has slower clocks, the exact same physical cores (hyper threading and all), less memory bandwidth, and fewer available PCI-E lanes. It also has exactly the same cache, though the uncore clock (and therefore the L3 cache clock) is likely to be a bit slower.

I have no doubt that the i5 will be fast, but to say that the i5 will beat the i7 is ludicrous.

It wins in super pi, and is a bit faster in 3DMark, tho within Margin of error. Itll ramp to 2.93 or thereabouts also. Fewer PCI lanes means just less for other things, and itll probably be only for single card solutions, but damned fast at that

I read through the entire thread about "i5 performance" on XS and they did not test any game. If you have a different thread in mind, can you link it?

On page 3, someone adjusted his i7 920 to mimic the i5's bclk and frequency, but all his benchmarks suggested his CPU was 1-3% behind. The whole socket is different, so is PCI-e, the L3 is unknown, RAM is different, and so forth.

Additionally, mainstream boards may not be as flexible with bclk, and multipliers are lower. That means OC's are unlikely to reach as high.

Not sure which one youre reading either
SuperPi 1M
i5: 19.017s
i7: 19.350s
and here
wPrime
i5 32M: 11.42 sec
i7 32M: 12.013 sec

i5 1024M: 352.199 sec
i7 1024M: 363.435 sec
and like I said, 3DMark was a dead heat. So for huindreds less, to me its a no brainer

Not at all. Remember the PCI Express controller will be inside the CPU silicon, and this will probably reduce the latency quite a bit. Dual vs Tri Channel has been proved useless in desktop apps, so it doesn't matter [now]. They still have lots of time to 'tune it' for a desktop environment.

Here are my scores at 2133MHz:

Wprime 32m: 11.091 sec
Wprime 1024m: 355.524 sec
Superpi 1m: 19.221 sec

Honestly, it seems like pretty much a dead heat to me (as it should be - these are the exact same processing cores working on a CPU limited process). I would say the bigger factor is what the peak clocks are, and the i7 is a higher binned part.

As for the PCI-E latency, I don't see it mattering terribly much. Perhaps I'll be proven wrong, but I seriously doubt that it is limiting framerates.

But isnt top Lynnefield = to 920? in clocks? Thats what Id thought, as I remember am old roadmap showing the top Lynnefield as considered highend

It's similarly clocked to the 920, but it's still lower binned silicon. At least that's what I can find so far. Honestly, I wouldn't worry about either's performance in games though.

Heres that roadmap. It looks like 2.93-3.0 Ghz for top Lynnefield

http://pc.watch.impress.co.jp/docs/2008/0602/kaigai01l....

I'd say that's a fairly safe bet.

So if the i7 and i5 chips are "even" with the Q9550 and what not in gaming, then this truly is a perfect time for AMD to strike in the desktop/gaming market.

I know the i7 is superior to Core 2 in every way pretty much, but these new chips are a good example as to what happens when there is no legit competition for an extended time, stagnation. Gaming performance and basic usage "numbers" from Q6600 to Q9550 to i7 940 is flatlined for the most part. If you have one you have them all.

Also, as somebody mentioned in the feedback to that review in the link, I think having all these sockets is a bad idea. Would have been much easier and much cheaper to just make weaker chips for LGA 1366 instead of this absurd LGA 1160 or whatever

It has to be a different socket - it has a physically different connection method. The 1366 has a QPI, while the 1160 does not, but it does have an onboard PCI-express. Because of this, the 1160 CPUs need a physically different motherboard than the 1366.

http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/core-i7-gaming,2061-11.html

No increase in gaming huh? Seems its the GPU's letting the i7 down to me... Tri SLI has big gains at 2560x1600 over the QX9770. ~40fps increase in farcry 2 at 2560x1600 is nothing to diss

Yep - in all honesty, when there seems to be almost no gains through 2 architectural revisions in gaming, and it is gaining performance in everything else, it is indicative of a bottleneck, not a lack of gaming performance on the new parts.

Fair enough, I havnt seen that bench before. I was referring to the first wave of benches, as honest thats all ive really glanced over.

Theres more to it than the HW in that link. If it was the cards only, then itd all be the same. I think its drivers, plain and simple, and so far, i7 can take advantage of those drivers much better. I also believe this will change in older quads favor as both ATI (especially needs to) and nVidia work on their drivers for optimizations for quads. As they get better, its hard to say we will see more from i7, but definately from other quads. Time will tell on this, I just wouldnt put it in the bank this is due just to i7s ability at this point

Just by going on that bench betrays tri fires ability alone , let alone quadfire.
http://www.behardware.com/articles/736-7/report-4-radeo...
Whoever did those benches for Toms didnt do something right

Crytek games are never good to grade hardware with. That Stalker bench gives a realistic view.

where on earth did you find that site? never heard of it lol
why didnt they use an i7 platform to eliminate the variables? i think his test setups were stupid being that a multi-platform actually does exist now. ATI has fresh drivers out now, Nvidia has theirs. i would argue TH was closer to "right" than behardware at least this time.

Someone seems to be doing something wrong... a review thats on different platforms and uses a game like stalker (plagued with bad driver issues from the start isnt a good start) im more inclined to stick with Toms on this one too.

How about Crysis? In all previous tests, quadfire looked like crap, and theres very little of trifire benches out. This is newer and using newer drivers. Im sticking with what I said, drivers are the main difference here

Is it just me or did you not also see it with ATI cards as well? Its across the board. Not just SLI. In fact a 9800GX2 shows pretty good performance increases as does 4870X2s and Quad SLI and the such.

I think thats where i7 will do the best there. Core i5 will still do well with the single card and thats fine for those who will stay with single GPU. Problem is, as I have said before, multi GPU cards are becoming more and more common and it seems Core i7 is able to feed it what it needs faster to give it better performance numbers.

Besides I wont go by 3DMark or Super Pi as a real idea in gaming. Spuer Pi is to iffy and we all know that 3DMark never shows true gaming performance.

The ATI cards didnt show near as well as the nVidia cards, and we all know the x2 is more powerful, but its getting stomped by the 280 sli. Its drivers. i7 can use the drivers much better if theyre optimized, and nVidias were, and will be even more so in the future, where I suspect the other quads will benefit more from them. Just looking at the ATI scores shows this, and ATIs drivers arent all that optimized, yet. What Im saying is, the better improvements will come later for the other quads, where those improvements wont be seen as much on i7, as i7 is already getting most of the optimisations already, crediting the i7, of course.

Super pi and 3DMark work somewhat as a pointer in perf if its used in similar HW. Theres not a huge difference betwen these cores, and their eventual platforms, as far as it pertains to games. Servers? Hell yes, but not so much as for gaming. Im not saying itll be exact either, I hate bungholios for this very reason, and the only time I mention them is for a close idea in like systems

Oh for mugz sake, Must you Jay? This is the same stuff youre doing in your own denab thread.


I suppose this is 'fact' because an Intel employee benched a chip. You did read the link you posted right.....you did see the guy posting was an intel employee, right? Well, at least its known, and hes not an Intel shill on a viral marketing campaign....not that it means you can trust his results anymore or less than any other forum post. Heres a thought.....why dont we wait for these things to hit the market before we start passing any opinions as fact, ehh?

I have a question: what happens with intel mobos? X58 for socket 1366, P55 for 1160? seems a little shallow to me.

Ill say it looks as good as i7's early returns. Now on to ocing!!!

Not sure yet. but remmeber none of the latter stuff comes out until next year.

Considering that Lynnfield still has a IMC and the PCIe bus on the chip I don't see why they wont be able to just throw the P55 onto a LGA 1366 socket mobo. The CPU itself controls how many PCIe lanes there are now so the only difference will be the price.

At that note, could it be that since the PCIe controller is directly on the CPU itself and does not have to go through the NB that thats why multi-GPU gaming sees good increases with a Core i7? Its just like how a IMC gives better memory bandwidth......

hmm, but the way the cpu connects with the NB is completely different from 1366 to 1060... lynnfield has to have some sort of mobo, im banking on the P55...

well hopefully they will not come out with a new socket right after 1366 was released.

Actually no. The extra pins on the Core i7 CPUs is because of the 192bit Tri Channel DDR3 conroller. Thats really all there is to it. So I doubt it will connect to differently to the point that it would stop a mobo maker from making a cheaper LGA1366 mobo with the P55.



Actually from what I have read Westmere (the 32nm die shrink of Nehalem) is supposed to use the same LGA1366. Haven't heard if they will use LGA1160, Lynnfield, but if they make dual channel 32nm CPUs I wouldn't doubt it would work since its just like AMD now with the IMC.

Only thing I can forsee needing a new socket is if they add a memory channel or when DDR4 comes out (2011 is the set year for it) IF it needs more pins but considering they made DDR2 and DDR3 use the same amoung of pins (just different layout) I doubt it would need a new socket, it should just use less voltage at higher speeds like DDR3 does.

If you ran a 1366 device on a P55, you'd immediately have the problem of no PCIe x16 (or x8 for that matter), which would be sub-optimal (to say the least) from a graphics performance perspective.

^Wait what? The PCIe controller is on the chip in both Core i5 and i7 chips. And thats what determins the lanes. So how would it change anything?

No. PCIe controller is still on the Northbridge on the i7/Tylersburg platform. The CPU connects to Tylersburg with QPI, so it's pretty low latency, but the fact remains PCIe still resides on the chipset on the i7.

Ta da PCIe off x58

Hmmm...

If the ICH10R only has SATAII and USB 2.0 then that means ICH11R should have either SATA II or USB 3.0 or both....

I would be willing to bet the i5 platform cant use sli, and probably will be xfire only.

Thats probably a good assumption