Intel SNA Ivy Bridge - September 2012

Due to the prolific driver development work being done by Intel's Chris Wilson to advance the SNA 2D acceleration architecture for the xf86-video-intel driver, here's some new benchmarks of "Sandy Bridge New Acceleration" when being run from an HD2500-class Core i5 "Ivy Bridge" processor using the new driver release from Sunday.

This benchmarking is quite straightforward and is comparing the SNA and UXA 2D acceleration methods offered by the X.Org Intel graphics driver on the latest xf86-video-intel 2.20.6 release. In addition, throughout testing the latest development Git code of the Linux 3.6 kernel and Mesa 9.0-devel was used for testing. The processor used for this testing was the currently-being-reviewed Intel Core i5 3470 "Ivy Bridge" quad-core with HD 2500 graphics.

If you're a faithful Phoronix reader you're already well aware of the SNA acceleration architecture with it having been around for more than one year now and is frequently a candidate for benchmarking due to the rapid advancements made single-handedly to it by Chris Wilson. If you're not familiar with the architecture, see all of the previous Phoronix SNA articles.