Intel Core i7-3720QM Ivy Bridge Mobile Review

Name: Intel Core i7-3720QM
Brand: Intel

by Dave Altavilla — Monday, April 23, 2012, 12:00 PM EDT

Rendering and Media Encoding: Cinebench and LAME MT

Cinebench R11.5 is a 3D rendering performance test based on Cinema 4D from Maxon. Cinema 4D is a 3D rendering and animation tool suite used by animation houses and producers like Sony Animation and many others. It's very demanding of system processor resources and is an excellent gauge of pure computational throughput.

Cinebench R11.5

3D Rendering on The CPU and IGP

This is a multi-threaded, multi-processor aware benchmark that renders a photorealistic 3D scene (from the viral "No Keyframes" animation by AixSponza). This scene makes use of various algorithms to stress all available processor cores. The rate at which each test system was able to render the entire scene is represented in the graph below.

In Cinebench, the Ivy Bridge Core i7-3720QM processor's OpenGL graphics score is almost 2X that of the Core i7-2820QM, making good initially on Intel's graphics performance claims. In terms of CPU, Ivy Bridge boasts an 18% edge over the fastest Sandy Bridge score.

LAME MT Audio Media Encoding

Multithreaded Audio Transcode

In our custom LAME MT MP3 encoding test, we convert a large WAV file to the MP3 format, which is a popular scenario that many end users work with on a day-to-day basis to provide portability and storage of their digital audio content. LAME is an open-source mid to high bit-rate and VBR (variable bit rate) MP3 audio encoder that is used widely around the world in a multitude of third party applications. In this test, we created our own 223MB WAV file and convert it to the MP3 format using the multi-thread capable LAME MT application in single and multi-thread modes. Processing times are recorded below, listed in seconds. Shorter times equate to better performance.

In Lame we only see a 10 - 13% advantage for the Core i7-3720QM Ivy Bridge chip. LAME is at best a dual-threaded application so this doesn't take advantage of Intel's latest mutlicore architectures all that well.