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

Naming

[fembots]

Looks like Intel's really moving away from marketing its GHz. Its Pentium M has been using 7xx, and this 64bit is on 6xx.

Intel plays catchup

[dmf415]

Intel has fallen behind as the mainstream CPU manufacterer. I wonder how long consumer will pay a premium for slower Intel CPUs

Analysts' assessments came after Intel announced last week that it was scrapping plans to develop a 4-gigahertz version of its Pentium 4 chip. On Tuesday, AMD unveiled a pair of advanced new chips, the Athlon 64 FX-55 and the Athlon 64 4000-plus, which analysts believe will be more appealing at the high end of the PC market.

more here:
http://www.newsfactor.com/story.xhtml?story _title= Analysts--AMD-Beating-Intel-in-Chip-Design&story_i d=27767&category=hardware

AMD64 Inside

[ackthpt]

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.

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

How has Intel sold more 64bit chips, unless you count the d00med itaniums.

heating

[Coneasfast]

how is the heating? have things gotten better, or can i still cook an egg on my box?

i couldn't find any references in the article.

maximum power consumption: 230W vs AMD's 64 4000+ of 203W

isn't really a complete indication of heat though

Re:heating

[Anonymous Coward]

Actually, a CMOS gate input will either source current, or require a pullup resistor. An output will sink current for a 0 or be open for a 1. Therefore, the I/O power loss is pretty much balanced. Additionally, this power sourced or sunk from the CPU by I/O is almost nothing, look at a datasheet sometime.
On a high performance CPU, power consumption is as follows:
20% --> Inter-gate leakage on die.
80% --> Losses caused by gate activity.
Typically, a CPU will use 20% of its max power prior to the clock even starting. After the clock tree is started, the CPU will now consume about 85% of its max power, even if idling (exlucding whack powersave features). During heavy computation will it finally reach 100%.
Also, the hotter the CPU runs, the more power it draws, due mostly to increased junction leakage.

Re:heating

[Bun]

So I guess the amount of electricity that flows out of the CPU to the different busses comes from the hamster pedalling inside the CPU?

Power is not distributed in series on a motherboard. There are separate rails for the CPU, PCI(X) bus, etc. The CPU power rating is the amount of power CONSUMED by the processor. It has nothing to do with the other elements in the system.

Re:Not impressed

[Rosco P. Coltrane]

And Alpha 21264 still outperforms Intel per watt. I'm not impressed.

That's a silly comment, it's like saying "my wristwatch calculator outperforms any Intel processor per watt". But wait... can I do heavy-duty image processing and 3D stuff with my wristwatch calculator??

The real question you should be asking yourself, with regard to such processors, is whether one is more powerful than another, period. Because power consumption is hardly their main selling point, although it can be a plus.

Hint of bias in the market against Intel.

[SlashdotTroll]

From the conclusion pageWith 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.

Intel "needs" to access installation data from the AMD64 folder? I thought the user was accessing the data from the AMD64 folder? What's next; Intel accessing its microcode from the folder AMD64/jonah/i386? Last I checked, it's AMD that always is compared to Intel and not the other way around. Is everyone jumping onto the AMD side now? Doesn't anyone remember that AMD cuts corners, especially apparent when a CPU's heatsink is dislodged?

Re:Not impressed

[tarquin_fim_bim]

I disagree, power consumption and dissipation is vitally important in rack-mounted equipment. The cost of cooling systems can be a prohibitive factor in an installation.

Re:Slower? Says who? You?

[i41Overlord]

That is just damage control going on at Ziff-Davis. Intel used to be a big investor in ZD, I don't know if they still are.

I remember when I worked at a mobo manufacturer back in the late 90's, ZD WinBench was the major benchmark used to measure the performance of chips/motherboards/PC's. This was during the time that AMD came out with the K6 processor, and had a lead in most benchmarks. Next thing you know, Intel's investing in ZD and ZD comes out with an "updated" version of the program. I test it out and suddenly AMD's chips seem to be choking on the benchmarks, while Intel's chips got a nice speed boost. Very shady tactics.

I dealt with Intel and I'll tell you that they're a very dirty company to deal with. They use the same tactics as the Microsofts, Walmarts, and other big companies that use their current power to stifle competition.

Intel 6xx heat is still a problem...

[dtjohnson]

The Intel 660 reviewed in the article has closed the gap quite a bit with the Athlon 64 4000+ but it looks like heat is still a problem for Intel, even with the new 6xx 'prescott' cpus. The Intel 660 has a thermal design envelope of 115 watts vs only 89 watts for the Athlon 64 4000+. More significantly, the Intel 660 has hardware and software mechanisms to automatically reduce the core voltage and clock speed when high temperatures occur as described in this review:

• Thermal Monitoring 2
  TM2 is overheat protection, controlled by the processor's PROCHOT signal (processor hot). This signal is activated if the CPU's thermal diode detects critical temperature levels. TM2 will dynamically reduce core voltage and clock speed in order to cool down the CPU.
• Enhanced SpeedStep
  SpeedStep does exactly the same as TM2, with the difference that it is initiated by the operating system. Whenever the system load is low, Windows XP SP2 will cause the CPU to lower the clock speed in 200 MHz increments by using ACPI mechanisms. Again, this is performed dynamically, which means that executing a demanding application will cause the system to speed up again.

These sorts of protective mechanisms mean that your "3.6 Ghz" Intel processor might not be operating at either 3.6 Ghz or the core voltage that you have selected when either the motherboard or the Windows XP operating system determine that the thermal situation is getting out of hand. The original idea behind the early implementations of this stuff was to protect your cpu from catastrophic damage when the cooling fan failed, or some similar catastrophic event. Now, however, the stealthy way that Intel is implementing these mechanisms in both the hardware and the OS suggests that they have moved into the realm of selling performance that the system may not thermally be capable of delivering on a sustained basis. Will the user see any indication that their system is slowing down or that the voltage has been decreased? In effect, the Intel systems are becoming more like 'dragsters' that are capable of short periods of high acceleration and speed but perhaps unable to operate at speed on a sustained basis.

Power consumption

[D. Book]

IMHO, the area in which AMD has really distinguished itself is in the power consumption of its desktop processors. Generally speaking, non-Intel x86 CPUs (from AMD and Cyrix) historically had a reputation for running extremely hot. The situation has been reversed in recent years, with Intel pushing the upper limits of power consumption with its Pentium 4 (especially with Prescott) while AMD was doing the exact opposite with its Athlon 64. This has resulted in a huge difference in power consumption between the two competitors. Consider the following CPUs which are basically direct competitors (roughly the same price):

Power consumption at idle
Athlon 64 3500+ (Winchester): 13.4W
Pentium IV 640 (Prescott 2M): 35.4W

Power consumption at full utilisation
Athlon 64 3500+ (Winchester): 47.5W
Pentium IV 640 (Prescott 2M): 129.4W

Source: 90nm Processors from AMD and Intel Pentium 4 6XX.

The often trivial differences in performance look rather insignificant in comparison. Also consider that these results come after Intel's best attempts at reducing the P4's power consumption (enhanced idle states in P4 5XX and SpeedStep in the 6XX) and you can see how inefficient the architecture is in this regard.

This of course applies to desktop CPUs. Intel redeems itself somewhat with its Pentium M in the notebook market.

Re:that is a typo

[branchingfactor]

I dont' think that one is a laugher because its true. Hyperthreading is surprisingly effective for most real world applications that are not I/O bound. I routinely get 99% utilization on two simultaneous processes per CPU with hyperthreading. By and large hyperthreading is like having a dual core CPU for free. And for most compute-intensive problems, it's better to have two slightly slower cpus (Intel HT) than one slightly faster cpu (AMD).

Re:Slower? Says who? You?

[trixy_1086]

I remember a few years ago, when my dad and i both upgraded our computers at the same time. We got chipsets both by SiS, motherboards both manufactured my elitegroup, only I got a Celeron 400 and he got a K6-2 450. Not only did my Celeron run faster, it ran cooler. Now, that was a Celeron. I'm not even sure how much faster a P2 of a similar speed would be. The gist of this is: I doubt that ZD, being a huge company with many investors, would sway so easily. Having used both chips, the Intel ones were faster at the point, and did offer more bang for the buck, at least as far as I can tell.

Re:Intel is expensive?

[Bnonn]

So you find it silly to be a fan of a corporation, but you don't find it silly to hold a grudge against one? You haven't forgiven AMD for marketing BS, yet you have chosen to ignore entirely similar BS from AMD? And you think that $20-$40, which amounts to around what, 10%-20% of a CPU's price, is a minimal difference? Where did you get that figure from anyway? I just checked the cheapest prices listed in New Zealand (where I live), and Intel offerings are over $100 more expensive than equivalent AMD ones.

Very consistent logic. Well done. Fanboy.