Core i5-3570K, -3550, -3550S, And -3570T: Ivy Bridge Efficiency

Benchmark Results: Productivity

Both Core i7s stand out yet again, followed by a predictable order of Core i5s organized by thermal design power.

Same story here, though now the advantage attributable to Hyper-Threading appears even more pronounced.

I was reviewing CPUs back when Intel introduced Hyper-Threading on the desktop, and let’s just say that it didn’t always turn into a performance advantage. In Visual Studio, though, it helps shave several minutes off of our Google Chrome compile job. The Core i5s (even the 45 W one) remain closer together.

Up until now, all of our tests have emphasized performance in the context of a threaded test—that is, an application able to take advantage of a multi-core processor. Those are the situations where you really want a quad-core chip able to handle eight threaded concurrently.

When it comes to converting a PowerPoint file to PDF, though, more cores don’t help. That’s why the Core i7-2700K drops to fourth place and the Ivy Bridge-based chips start jumping ahead of it. Although the improvements to Intel’s newest architecture are slight, they’re enough to affect our result by a couple of seconds.