Intel Ivy Bridge On Linux Two-Month Redux

Some of the positive coverage of Ivy Bridge since launch has included:

- Comparing 12 different code compilers on the i7-3770K. Overall, GCC and LLVM/Clang are the fastest and most well supported open-source compilers for this latest Intel micro-architecture. The latest LLVM/Clang and GCC support the latest CPU capabilities of Ivy Bridge and bring other performance optimizations.

- Ivy Bridge compiler tuning can yield additional gains for those building their own software from source code.

- Ivy Bridge offers good virtualization performance under Linux with KVM.

- Ivy Bridge performance improvements with the Linux 3.4 kernel.

- Intel's new WiFi adapter works "out of the box" on Linux.

- Optimizing the Intel OpenGL performance by moving away from Ubuntu's Unity/Compiz desktop.

- Fedora 17 and Ubuntu 12.04 on Ivy Bridge provides for a heated battle.

- Other results showing Ivy Bridge grinding quickly on Linux.

- Intel Z77 motherboards (a.k.a. Panther Point) are working well with the latest Linux distributions.

- The Intel Mesa "classic" DRI driver is still much faster to running LLVMpipe on the i7-3770K.

- VA-API video acceleration works on Ivy Bridge.

- The SNA acceleration architecture benefits the 2D performance for Ivy Bridge, but the GLAMOR acceleration architecture usually causes regressions.

- The Core i7 3770K can beat on a performance-per-Watt basis the Phoronix ARMv7 OMAP4 cluster. It is also superior to the 96-core Ubuntu ARM solar-powered super-computer that was built at MIT.

- Last week Intel published their Ivy Bridge programming documentation.

Aside from all of these additional tests that have come, next up will be trying Linux on the new MacBook Pro with Retina display. It will be interesting to see how the Linux and Mac OS X 10.7 OpenGL performance compares when using the Ivy Bridge graphics core. There will also be other Intel Ivy Bridge Linux benchmarks and news coming as the open-source landscape continues to evolve.

The Ivy Bridge Linux support is still being improved within GCC, the Linux kernel, Mesa, etc. At the same time, Intel Open-Source Technology Center developers are already very busy on pushing support for the next-generation hardware: the lovely Valley View and Haswell.

Overall, I remain very happy with the Intel Ivy Bridge processors under Linux and continue to recommend them to open-source customers. The Ivy Bridge launch was quite smooth with minimal issues in comparison to last year's Sandy Bridge launch that caused a few headaches for some Linux users early on.