Intel SNA Ivy Bridge - September 2012
As has been the case for many months, the SNA acceleration architecture is generally superior to the default UXA acceleration in terms of accelerated 2D performance. For many benchmarks -- whether using the Ivy Bridge back-end, Sandy Bridge back-end, or one of the earlier back-ends for hardware support -- SNA slaughters UXA by noticeable margins. With this latest testing of the SNA Ivy Bridge back-end from the Core i5 3470 with HD 2500 graphics, there were a few cases though where UXA came out in front. This was a bit of a surprise since usually SNA is the winner clear across the board. The SNA Ivy Bridge losses this time seem to be mostly concentrated with x11perf. This isn't too incredibly concerning though since Chris Wilson continues tweaking the SNA code up to several times per day and frequently when new Phoronix benchmarks are published he's onto optimizing the performance further almost immediately, so by the time you're reading this, Chris will probably have the issues sorted out.
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