Intel Yonah Performance Preview

illusoryphoenix writes "Anandtech has an interesting preview of the successor to Dothan (Pentium M's second generation), Yonah, with tests run on an engineering sample. It seems like latest Pentium M is still lagging in the floating point area, but has gained some ground overall. It's also interesting to note their comparisons to the Pentium D/Netburst based dual core."

Comments

Wow

[Sinryc]

I really have to wonder when Intel will start using this technology in desktops. It really does seem like a good idea. From TFA "At 2.0GHz, Yonah is basically equal to, if not slightly slower than an Athlon 64 X2 running at the same clock speed in virtually all of the tests we ran. " That right there should show that Intell is should switch its R&D and support the Pentium M as a desktop chip.

Re:Wow

[darkmeridian]

Of course, it may have to get rid of its inventory of desktop Pentium 4 chips and might conflict with Intel commitments to Dell not to obsolete all of their offerings. Intel has to change fabs to make the new chips in larger amounts. All of the marketing about higher clock speeds have to go out the window, too. Furthermore, Intel has to concede that it made a huge mistake and that AMD was right all along with regard to the performance per cycle/pure megahertz debate.

Not impressed, because you didn't pay attention

[Tumbleweed]

This is a _mobile_ chip being compared to _desktop_ chips. You _should_ be impressed. And when the next generation comes out in 2H2006, Merom, any remaining performance gap will probably be gone, plus it'll then be 64-bit, too, though of course, AMD will hopefully keep making strides in the meantime, with their upcoming socket M2-based offerings.

That this is likely the Intel chip to be used in upcoming Macs is a very good sign for future Mac owners like myself.

Re:Not impressed, because you didn't pay attention

[Jeffrey Baker]

Why should we be impressed again? AMD's top mobile CPU, the Turion 64 ML-37, is equivalent to the Athlon 64 X2 3800+, which is the CPU that beats Yonah in all these tests. So the only thing to be happy about here is that Powerbook and iBook battery life will probably be pretty good. And of course those models are currently using ass-slow G4 chips, so anything is an improvement.

But for iMac and Powermac buyers what this means is being stuck with Intel CPUs that really can't hang with AMD's offering. I mean seriously, AMD currently offers FIVE models that are faster than this Yonah thing, all of which are also faster than the best of the Pentium 4 line.

Re:Not impressed, because you didn't pay attention

[Jeffrey Baker]

Yeah sorry, I was only thinking about single-threaded performance. I too would like to see the MT Turion compared, but I believe there's no 2.0GHz part in that line (yet). You'll hear no argument from me about Intel's 65nm process and wonderfully low power consumption. It's obviously going to make from great mobile Macs.

Re:Not impressed, because you didn't pay attention

[Dun Malg]

A Turion isn't equivalent to an Athlon X2 (even if the Turion was dual-core, which it isn't); they've also got different FSB speeds, AFAIK.

FWIW, unlike Intel which is still bottlenecking memory access over the FSB through the northbridge, for AMD64 series CPUs the FSB speed is largely irrelevant to performance. FSB only really matters when you're using it to talk to RAM, and all the AMD64's have HyperTransport on-die memory controllers running at 800mhz. At present the Turion is only single-core and has only a single channel on-die memory controller, compared to dual core, dual channel for the X2. As I understand it though, the Turion will be dual core and dual channel as well Q2 2006.

How much lunch can you eat?

[FishandChips]

Just my 2 cents, but sooner or later the PC world needs to break away from this fixation on legacy desktop PCs with their Heath Robinson contraptions of wires, grouchy PSUs and naked circuit boards, not to mention size and noise. The line that caught my eye in this review: "A 2.0GHz Yonah under 100% load consumes less power than an Athlon 64 X2 3800+ at idle."

Unless it is for gaming or for special and demanding applications, who needs all this muscle? A few more steps in the Yonah development line and we may be able to see PCs that are far smaller, quieter and more frugal with the juice while still packing a punch.

None of this means that the Ahtlon 64 isn't darn good, only that it is not appropriate for many computing situations. Right now, Yonah looks more like a stab at tomorrow whereas the Athlon 64 represents the apogee of yesterday.