Intel Xeon E3-1280 v2 Review: Ivy Bridge Goes Professional

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Intel recently introduced its Xeon E3-1200 v2 CPUs, based on the Ivy Bridge architecture. Though they're very similar to the third-generation desktop Core chips, ECC memory support, four extra PCIe 3.0 lanes, and attractive pricing grab our attention.

Benchmark Results: Productivity

ABBYY’s OCR software is sensitive to clock rate, IPC, and the number of cores in a given architecture. Ivy Bridge doesn’t seem to help FineReader much, though, given the -1280 v2’s one-second advantage over the Xeon E3-1290 also running at 3.6 GHz.

There’s little difference between processors in Visual Studio 2010. Intel’s Ivy Bridge architecture maintains its first-place position, but not by much. Moreover, the faster (and more expensive) 3.6 GHz chips don’t see much benefit over the 3.4 GHz Xeon E3-1275 in this test.

Responding primarily to clock rate, the 3.6 GHz Xeon E3s (both the Sandy and Ivy Bridge-based parts) score similarly. They’re faster than the 3.4 GHz model, though.

Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini
Chris Angelini is an Editor Emeritus at Tom's Hardware US. He edits hardware reviews and covers high-profile CPU and GPU launches.