Intel still has quite a few surprises with 22nm Ivy Bridge parts, especially for three huggers who think that 65W TDP should be plenty for a desktop CPU.

In this low power market, Ivy Bridge is doing really fine and you can see improvements up to 27 percent compared to Core i7 2600S. Core i7 3770S is 65W quad-core with eight threads and 8MB cache clocked at 3.2GHz. It replaces Core i7 2600S a 2.8GHz quad with eight threads and 8MB cache.

Not only is the new generation 300MHz faster, but turbo gets the 3770S all the way to 3.9GHz, while sticking to the 65W envelope. Intel has also the Core i7 3770K, a 3.5GHz CPU with 3.9GHz turbo clock and a TDP of 77W, kind of a new TDP category for Intel, but the company does not consider 77W parts as low power products.

In the Excel 2010 test, Core i7 3770S scores 27 percent faster than i7 2600S. This is a huge improvement in just one generation. It looks like Ivy Bridge cores like Cinebench 11.5 test and in this one, Core i7 3770S scores 24 percent more than i7 2600S, again a huge improvement. In HDXPRT 2011, Core i7 3770S outpaces the i7 2600S by 19 percent, followed by Pro Show Gold 4.5, where Core i7 3770S ends up 18 percent faster than the “old” i7 2600S.

Last but not least, in Sysmark 2012 the Core i7 3770S scores 12 percent more than i7 2600S. This looks quite great for a 65W quad, as just a few years back you needed a 130W TDP for proper desktop quads that did not sacrifice performance for efficiency. The 22nm process promises to make Ivy Bridge a very efficient part indeed, polar bears will love it.