Intel’s Sandy Bridge i7-2820QM: Upheaval in the Mobile Landscape
by Jarred Walton on January 3, 2011 12:00 AM EST- Posted in
- Laptops
- Intel
- Sandy Bridge
- Compal
Mobile Sandy Bridge Medium Gaming Performance
Moving up to medium detail, the picture becomes a lot less rosy. We’ll just forget about the Arrandale IGP and HD 4250 now, as they were generally slow to unplayable at Low settings and become untenable at Medium. Overall, HD 3000 still leads the HD 5470, but the GeForce 320M actually turns in better results at Medium detail and ends up 6% faster. The P520 + HD 5650 lead is now 67%, since more of the bottleneck is shifted to the GPU, or 98% when coupled to Arrandale. NVIDIA’s GT 425M also leads by 68%. If we’re looking for reasonably smooth gaming performance, only Mass Effect 2 and STALKER manage to squeak past the 30FPS mark.
At the Medium settings, we also encountered a few minor glitches with rendering games. For the above six titles, Left 4 Dead 2 is the only problem, with darker graphics than on other GPUs and a much more pronounced film grain effect. You can turn down the latter setting to compensate, but even at maximum brightness the game is still darker than on AMD and NVIDIA graphics. A driver update should be able to address this, but it does serve to illustrate the fact that not all titles will run 100% properly on the current Intel drivers.
That last point raises an interesting question: just how many games will have minor glitches or other issues with the Sandy Bridge IGP? Without testing each game for compatibility, we can’t provide an answer, but we did pull out a large selection of older and newer titles for additional testing. If you have any further requests, feel free to ask and we can try to see if the game(s) in question will run on Sandy Bridge or not—bearing in mind that we don’t have access to all current titles. So let’s see how SNB graphics fare on 14 additional games.
Facebook
Twitter
RSS
66 Comments
View All Comments
tipoo - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Sorry if I missed this somewhere in the review, but does the graphics component support OpenCL?RyuDeshi - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
Second to last paragraph on the "Extended compatibility and performance results:""Ultimately, Sandy Bridge’s IGP is far more capable than many would have expected. Sure, it doesn’t even try to support DX11 or OpenCL, but at least for gaming DX11 is typically too much for even midrange GPUs."
CharonPDX - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
An Intel rep has said that Sandy Bridge will support OpenCL. (http://news.cnet.com/8301-13924_3-20024079-64.html ) The trick is that it may be a combo CPU+GPU to do it. So it may not be what you are thinking by OpenCL being solely GPU, but OpenCL code should be able to run.And in the end, what does it matter, really, as long as it runs? As the desktop Sandy Bridge review points out, video encoding is just as fast using solely the x86 codepaths as using nVidia's CUDA or ATI's Stream.
Voldenuit - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
OpenCL was designed from the outset to run on heterogenous resources, including CPU.So intel claiming that they "support" OpenCL is nothing special - they just needed the right drivers/API.
However, don't expect OpenCL code running solely on the CPU (my guess as to how SB will handle it) to be any faster than the x86 codepath running on the same CPU.
Checkbox feature.
jameskatt - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
What Intel wants to do is to have the CPU run OpenCL code.This totally defeats the purpose of OpenCL.
OpenCL is suppose to allow both the GPU and the CPU to run code simultaneously. This is to allow significant acceleration in running OpenCL code compared to using just the CPU.
Sure. OpenCL code will run. But it will run MORE SLOWLY than with a discrete GPU. And the 16 GPUs in Sandy Bridge will be wasted.
Intel's Sandy Bridge has non-programmable GPUs. This is a serious limitation and deal killer when it comes to running OpenCL code.
I expect Apple to continue use nVidia's or AMD's discrete GPUs with the MacBooks and Mac Book Pros.
This is very disappointing. It shows that Intel still doesn't have the talent to produce decent GPUs.
PlasmaBomb - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
*cough* I think you mean 12 EU *cough*
Guspaz - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
<i>What Intel wants to do is to have the CPU run OpenCL code.This totally defeats the purpose of OpenCL.
OpenCL is suppose to allow both the GPU and the CPU to run code simultaneously. This is to allow significant acceleration in running OpenCL code compared to using just the CPU.</i>
No, this is the *primary* purpose of OpenCL. The goal of OpenCL is not to "allow the GPU and CPU to run code simultaneously", but to provide a single unified code path that can be used with any hardware, be it CPU or GPU. There are/were already code paths specific to each vendor/type (CUDA for nVIDIA GPUs, Stream for AMD/ATI GPUs, x86 for Intel/AMD CPUs). The problem is that fully supporting all three platforms requires three separate code paths.
OpenCL unifies this, and allows a single codepath to be used regardless of the GPU's type or existence. You've completely misunderstood the purpose of OpenCL.
Wiggy McShades - Tuesday, January 4, 2011 - link
You need to ask what applications on a desktop actually use OpenCL in a meaningful way? Intel added hardware for media transcoding, which makes transcoding on something besides the cpu useless and that was roughly all openCL can be used for on the desktop, laptop, or cellphone.OpenCL is for vector calculations, AVX is for vector calculations. All four cores running AVX instructions would just be a faster choice than OpenCL on a low end gpu. Intel most likely could get sandybridge's gpu running OpenCL, but it would be pointless. OpenCL just is not a desktop feature.
strikeback03 - Wednesday, January 5, 2011 - link
Given how much money they have, I doubt Intel is lacking the "talent" to do anything they want. OpenCL execution on the GPU portion of the SNB chips was probably just not that big a deal to them, and given the number of other things (such as speed and battery life) SNB brings to the table they probably won't have trouble selling lots of these to the average consumer.8steve8 - Monday, January 3, 2011 - link
which mobile cpus on pg1 support TXT or VT-d or AES-NI or VT-x or Quick Sync?