Intel Core i7 3770K Ivy Bridge Linux Performance

Intel is finally announcing the first Ivy Bridge processors this morning. I have been extensively testing out the Intel Core i7 3770K, the current high-end Ivy Bridge processor, for the past few weeks under Ubuntu Linux. I have been extremely pleased with the Intel Core i7 Ivy Bridge processor under Linux with its phenomenal performance, power efficiency, and new features. This article is the first of many looking at the Linux performance of the new Intel Ivy Bridge processors.

Ivy Bridge is the successor to Intel's Sandy Bridge that launched in January of 2012. When it came to the much-improved graphics of Intel Sandy Bridge CPUs, the Linux support at launch was not in great shape for what was found in Linux distributions of the time and there were a few initial bugs. Fortunately, that is not the case with Ivy Bridge. The Ivy Bridge Linux graphics support is in terrific shape for being enabled open-source hardware support at launch. Other areas of the processor are also well supported already by Linux and open-source software, such as with the latest LLVM/Clang and GCC compilers already supporting Ivy Bridge and its new instructions and random hardware number generator. Ivy Bridge is really great on Linux.

In this article are Linux processor benchmarks of the Intel Core i7 3770K under Linux compared to various other Intel and AMD processors. In another article today will be the start of the Intel Ivy Bridge Linux graphics articles. Additionally, some of the other upcoming Ivy Bridge Linux articles (yes, it's going to be many pages, so consider subscribing to Phoronix Premium for ad-free viewing and to view entire articles on a single page) in the following days/weeks at Phoronix include:

- An extensive comparison of the open-source Ivy Bridge Linux graphics driver performance compared to multiple AMD Radeon and NVIDIA GeForce graphics cards on their Mesa Gallium3D drivers.

- A comparison of various compiler tuning options on Ivy Bridge for GCC 4.7 and LLVM/Clang 3.1.

- Comparing LLVM/Clang, GCC, DragonEgg, and other code compiler performance on the Core i7 3770K processor.

- A comparison of the Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge OpenGL graphics performance under Microsoft Windows 7 and Ubuntu 12.04 LTS Linux.

- Seeing how well the Ivy Bridge Linux graphics driver has evolved already across Mesa and various Linux kernel releases.

- Testing various Intel Z77 motherboards under Linux.

- Benchmarks of Intel Ivy Bridge under Solaris and *BSD too.

- Intel SNA 2D acceleration on Ivy Bridge.

Plus various other Ivy Bridge Linux articles will come, just as there's been several dozen Sandy Bridge Linux articles on Phoronix over the past year as the open-source graphics support has matured, various new features implemented, and other progress (or regressions) spotted. Special thanks also go out to Intel today for caring enough about at-launch Linux coverage of Ivy Bridge to have shipped the hardware for testing well in advance of the launch, compared to scrambling at the last minute for clarifying the Sandy Bridge on Linux support state.

First, let's look at what is new with Intel's Ivy Bridge processors.