Intel 6xx Series Reviewed and Benchmarked

sebFlyte writes "It's been a long time coming, but Intel's first 64-bit desktop chip (the 6xx series) is here now, and thanks to ZDNet it has been thoroughly tested. The article has the full specs of the new family, explains the benefits of the changes, and also the results of tests on the new chips to establish perfomance boosts for games, photo manipulation and video work, among other things."

Comments

Re:Intel plays catchup

[bird603568]

I would think that intel is "the mainstream" maker. Maybe not the best, but most common. What do Dell and Gateway use? Intel and NOT AMD. So what is the mainstrem maker then?

Go AMD

[Stevyn]

On most of the benchmarks, AMD seemed to perform a little better. On a side note,

"Intel's EM64T architecture can implement Windows' x86-64 mode"

I thought this was called amd64.

Re:Go AMD

[Anonymous Coward]

EM64T uses 48 bit memory addressing, but it has 64bit registers as oppossed to AMD64 which uses 64 bits for all. Though, with EM64T you "only" get 251 TB of memory addressing.

Re:Naming

[pbranes]

Considering that Intel has been at 3.6GHz for quite a while now, it is no surprise they are focusing on processor power instead of just raw GHz. Apple, Motorola, IBM, and especially AMD have all been doing this for years - time for Intel to join the future.

What's interesting is that on a new computer box, the processor type is mentioned in bold lettering, but the GHz is now in really tiny type - it used to be the exact opposite. Moore's law will have to be fulfilled in new, unique ways.

I love this statement

[dot_borg]

"...although there is, as yet, no shipping 64-bit Windows operating system, which is necessary to make the most of a 64-bit CPU."

I've been using 64 bit Gentoo for like a year now, but I guess that doesn't count.

Re:I love this statement

[Anonymous Coward]

What, you consider Gentoo a "Windows operating system"?

Its murky in here...

[Tiger4]

The trouble with Intel products is trying to know what they're good for. In the rush to be something for everybody, they have saturated their own market and it is very difficult to tell the real benefits of one processor over another.

Why would I want a 540 over a 530 over a 520 ? I assume price, but is there something else? And the same goes for the Centrino and other lines. Not that they are useless, but there is no clear statement, "you need an M processor for that problem".

AMD has been better about this, trying to clearly differentiate AMD 64 from the FX line. And they named Opteron a whole new name, even though the 1xx is very similar to the FX line. Good move on all counts. And when AMD gets their version of hyperthreading working, it will be better yet.

Re:Its murky in here...

[Tiger4]

Feeding the troll just his once... Looking at an AMD product name tells me real performance information, i.e. a 3200 is nominally 6.66% faster than a 3000. Looking at Intel, a P4 540 is faster than a 538, but how much? AMD could make it clearer in their FX and Opeteron lines, but once you know the performance of one, you can estimate the others. but it isn't like you cared about the real answer anyway.

Slower? Says who? You?

[WIAKywbfatw]

While I agree with you that Intel is playing catch-up in the desktop 64-bit arena, if you had RTFA then you would have found that it concludes with a performance summary that suggests that Intel's 64-bit CPUs more than hold their own:

As far as performance is concerned, the 3.6GHz Pentium 4 660 can hold its own against its main competitor, the Athlon 64 4000+. The Intel chip performs particularly well if several tasks are running at the same time; under these circumstances, the Pentium 4 can outpace its AMD rival even if the latter is quicker at performing the tasks on their own. Thanks to HyperThreading (HT), the Pentium 4 distributes processing tasks across two virtual cores, resulting in more efficient utilisation of CPU resources. Such scenarios are found ever more frequently in the real world. For example, no-one should venture onto the Internet without firewall, antivirus and anti-spyware protection. These services are constantly active and need appropriate resources. Likewise, operations such as data encryption or hard disk defragmentation can load the processor, while the user compresses streaming video or audio data. Under such usage patterns, the advantage of HT is particularly apparent.

With the 6xx-series Pentium 4, Intel has ensured that important functionality such as protection from memory overflow, power management and 64-bit support on the desktop is no longer an AMD domain. And with HT support and SSE3 instructions, the new Intel processors offer additional benefits. One change will annoy Intel, however: on the installation CD for Windows XP Professional x64 Edition, the most important operating system files are no longer in the 'i386' folder; Intel systems must load the installation files now from the 'AMD64' folder. Although that might hurt the industry leader, Intel may draw comfort from the fact that it has already sold more 64-bit chips than the inventor of the x86-64 architecture, AMD.

Now, I have no doubt that Intel's 64-bit offerings will fall behind their AMD equivalents when it comes to bang-per-buck but that conclusion seems to suggest that Intel's chips will still have plenty of bang, as much as if not more than AMD's chips.

Remember, Intel's chips are just getting to market, whereas AMD's have been out there for at least 12 months. Who's to know who'll be lording it over who in a year or two when the 64-bit market is finally more than a tiny subset of the market as a whole? It might be AMD, it might be Intel, or it might be neither.

And before the accusations start, no, I'm not an Intel fanboy or shill who's interested only in running down AMD: this post is being typed on a AMD Athlon-based PC, my last PC had an AMD CPU, and my next one almost definitely will too. What I am interested in is a fair and accurate comparisons of the processors of the future, regardless of who they are made by.

Re:Slower? Says who? You?

[Glock27]

Such scenarios are found ever more frequently in the real world. For example, no-one should venture onto the Internet without firewall, antivirus and anti-spyware protection. These services are constantly active and need appropriate resources. Likewise, operations such as data encryption or hard disk defragmentation can load the processor, while the user compresses streaming video or audio data. Under such usage patterns, the advantage of HT is particularly apparent.

This is basically BS. Firewally, anti-virus, and anti-spyware are either 1) dedicated hardware or 2) run sporadically without being CPU-bound. How many people defragment their disk other than at 3:00 AM Sunday morning? And "data encryption" is a non-starter for most except for SSL encryption.

Nice try, though...

That said, dual core and/or regular timeslicing will work for all this as well anyhow...

Re:Slower? Says who? You?

[Jollyeugene]

This article also compares Intel's announced CPU's with AMD's CPU's that you can actually buy. This is just a fluff piece-- same as the "Extreme Edition" that would overheat and that no one could buy for around 6 months.

If you look at yesterdays news, you will see that AMD is releasing dual core chips soon. So when both of these new chips actually are available in quantity-- then lets do a review. Hyperthreading will not look so good then.

Hyper Threading is an engineering solution to try and fix the problem created by Intel's marketing department-- when the company let them design the Pentium 4 to scale on Megahertz and not on performance. After that fiasco, Intel got its butt handed to it on just about all benchmarks by the Athlon. Intel management then panicked, and Intel's engineers salvaged the long processor pipeline with "Hyper Threading".

Dual cores (SMP) are the better solution. When dual cores come out, hyper threading looses most of its advantage.

That article reads like a typical ZDNet article.

[i41Overlord]

ZDNet tries to be slick about it, but there's no mistaking who has influence at Ziff-Davis.

When AMD comes out with something, it usually doesn't make the news or is seriously downplayed. However when Intel fires back a few months later, it's suddenly big news, worthy of headlines.

When Intel releases a CPU that is faster than any of AMD's offerings, there is usually a big story that accompanies the event, praising Intel and their engineering prowess. However, when AMD releases a CPU that outpaces the Intel offerings, the fact is heavily downplayed. You can tell there's some damage control going on at this "objective" media outlet.

Re:AMD64 Inside

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

Ha, like Microsoft will leave that called AMD64. Expect some diplomacy and a renaming. Not that anyone but techies care.

Why would they care? When Intel invented the i*86 line, everybody software manufacturer called any Intel-compatible CPU "i*86" somewhere or other, and neither AMD, Cyrix,... complained about it. Now the situation is reversed: AMD took the lead on that particular 64 bit design, and Intel is just a follower here. It sounds rather normal and deserved that any AMD64-compatible chip should generically called "AMD64" after all.

Re:that is a typo

[Master Bait]

Did you read the article? All cpus are tested with both 32bit and 64bit code.

Only two 64-bit apps, Povray and Panorama Factory. As a matter of fact, didn't you also notice that the benhmarks were mostly SSE math on very large datasets?

This one is a laugher:

The Intel chip performs particularly well if several tasks are running at the same time; under these circumstances, the Pentium 4 can outpace its AMD rival even if the latter is quicker at performing the tasks on their own.

... meaning they were doing SSE math on two very large dataset files. They likely ran Intel-picked benchmarks which show that Intel's SSE instruction set is faster than AMDs. The benchmarks on streaming data hide the horrific latency of DDR2, don't show anything about integer performance, performance of the system in handling interrupts, etc.

Re:What? No more GHZ?

[jacksonj04]

What people also fail to grasp is that MHz make very little difference at all in most applications. My current machine has a 1.8GHz CPU (AMD if you must know) and beats the latest 3.6GHz into the ground. Why? Because the mobo is high quality, I've got oodles of fast RAM (God bless Crucial), my HDDs are fast...

Your processor can be as fast as you like but without the supporting hardware it does nothing special.

Intel is expensive?

[slackmaster2000]

Last time I looked (just now!), Intel processors are only $20-40 more expensive than comparable AMD processors. The big price difference isn't so big anymore.

I'm no Intel fan...I find it silly to be a "fan" of a corporation. In fact two of my three current systems are AMD based, including the one I'm writing this on. However, I must say that buying a machine with an Intel chipset is considerably more idiot proof than buying AMD - mostly because there are just too many AMD chipsets to choose from, many of which (esp. from VIA, SiS) turn out to be pretty quirky. I'm glad that I've found at least some consistancy from nVidia (nforce2 and >).

It's fun to hate Intel because they're the giant, but I for one still have not forgiven AMD for the K6-x processors and all their marketing BS that amounted to outright lies in my opinion. I also think they're stretching it a bit right now with their current "intel comparable" numbering scheme.

Good, fast, reliable systems can be made with both AMD and Intel at this point, and the total cost difference is really minimal. I certainly find strange that anyone would be bashing either company in this regard at this time.

Re:Intel is expensive?

[Shanep]

Last time I looked (just now!), Intel processors are only $20-40 more expensive than comparable AMD processors. The big price difference isn't so big anymore.

If the two latest Intel and AMD CPU's are both $100, but the AMD is 10% faster, which are you going to buy? All other things being equal?

Now make that situation worse by making the slower CPU more expensive by ANY amount.

Money is money. Who would knowingly choose less for more?

Re:Quake 2... 30 fps?

[IoN_PuLse]

They published far too little information about how they benchmarked these games. Just the resolution, and that's about it. No driver versions, game versions...and their so-called .NET version of Quake II is just the C version with the ability to use .NET managed C++ code...but unless they have some magical version nobody else has, it's just the plain C. Didn't they think that they were getting low numbers for Quake II?! They were lower than HL2, Doom3...I don't trust any of the benchmarks with obviously incorrect results like they've posted.

Re:XD bit

[Anonymous Coward]

Do you subscribe to security mailing lists for Debian? How about Gentoo? Because I do. And there are buffer overflows reported in various software packages almost everyday. Not all of them are in core system software, but many are.

Linux coders are no better than Windows coders. C in Linux is no safer than C in Windows.