Intel Core i7 3770K Ivy Bridge previewed

AnandTech got its hands on an Intel Core i7 3770K "Ivy Bridge" sample and published a preview, you can read it over here. The site reports they're quite impressed by the gains they've seen, Ivy Bridge is about 5-15 percent faster than Sandy Bridge at a similar price point, and especially the GPU is significantly faster, although still not as good as AMD's APUs.

The power savings from 22nm are pretty good on the desktop. Under heavy CPU load we measured a ~30W decrease in total system power consumption compared to a similar Sandy Bridge part. If this is an indication of what we can expect from notebooks based on Ivy Bridge I'd say you shouldn't expect significant gains in battery life under light workloads, but you may see improvement in worst case scenario battery life. For example, in our Mac battery life suite we pegged the Sandy Bridge MacBook Pro at around 2.5 hours of battery life in our heavy multitasking scenario. That's the number I'd expect to see improve with Ivy Bridge. We only had a short amount of time with the system and couldn't validate Intel's claims of significant gains in GPU power efficiency but we'll hopefully be able to do that closer to launch.