Intel Core i3/i5 Sandy Bridge & Ivy Bridge Linux Performance Update

For those curious about the performance of Intel's Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge processors when upgrading to Ubuntu 13.10 and the experimental Linux 3.13 along with the latest stable GCC 4.8.2 compiler, here's some fresh benchmarks from several different Intel Core i3 and Core i5 CPUs.

In this article for your Sunday viewing pleasure are just some updated performance numbers for four different Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge era CPUs. Most often at Phoronix we're focusing on the Linux developments for the latest-generation Haswell CPUs, so for taking a step back I ran some tests recently to share new numbers of when using these slightly older CPUs on the updated Linux software. The benchmarks in this article are mainly focusing upon the processor performance of the Sandy/Ivy Bridge CPUs while an article soon will look at the latest graphics performance for these CPUs with Intel HD Graphics.

Ubuntu 13.10 x86_64 was at play along with a recent Git snapshot of the Linux 3.13 kernel, GCC 4.8.2 as packaged for Saucy, an EXT4 file-system, and Mesa 10.1-devel (though that's not important for today's testing). All four processors were tested with an ASRock Z68 Pro3 motherboard with 8GB of RAM and an OCZ SATA 2 64GB SSD.

The four tested processors included an Intel Core i3 2120 (dual-core Sandy Bridge CPU with Hyper Threading; 3.3GHz clock speed), Core i5 2400S (quad-core low-power Sandy Bridge with a 2.5GHz base frequency and 3.3GHz Turbo Frequency), Core i5 2500K (quad-core Sandy Bridge with 3.3GHz base frequency and 3.7GHz Turbo Frequency), and Core i5 3470 (quad-core Ivy Bridge with 3.2GHz base frequency and 3.6GHz Turbo Frequency).

All of these fresh Sandy Bridge and Ivy Bridge benchmarks were conducted using the Phoronix Test Suite. What this means is that you can trust the results since they're 100% reproducible, fully automated from start-to-finish on an industry-used open-source platform, and allow for -- and encourage -- building upon these results with further comparisons. If you want to see how your own system compares to the CPU benchmarks for these four Intel processors, it's as easy as installing the Phoronix Test Suite on your own system -- regardless of distribution or components -- and then simply run phoronix-test-suite benchmark 1312046-SO-SANDYIVYB45 for a fully-automated set, test execution, and result analysis process.