Intel’s Ivy Bridge has had its mobile side tested early in unofficial benchmarks. Bulgaria’s Laptop.bg was given a reference notebook with the unreleased 2.3GHz, quad Core i7-3610QM and overall saw a clear performance edge over the current 2.2GHz Core i7-2670QM. In CPU tests for Cinebench 10 and 11, the difference was between eight and 22 percent, respectively.
Photoshop CS5 wasn’t a significant edge for Ivy Bridge, although it may have been partly leaning on graphics acceleration for some of the filters.
The newer, integrated HD 4000 graphics still weren’t enough to topple competitors in a fully modern graphics test like 3DMark 11, but the reduced visual effects of 3DMark 2005 helped it outrun almost everything else in the more CPU-bound test. Gaming was playable with modern titles, although it still required dropping detail settings to run smoothly.
Intel is poised to unveil its first Ivy Bridge processors on April 29. The initial mobile processors are all expected to be quad Core i7 models and should be destined for mid- to large-size notebooks.
