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Intel's Conroe Previewed and Benchmarked

Posted by ryuzaki0 on from the under-the-hood dept.

DrFishstik writes "Anandtech has a few preliminary benchmarks on Intel's new Conroe architecture. From the article: 'As far as we could tell, there was nothing fishy going on with the benchmarks or the install. Both systems [AMD 2.8Ghz OC and Conroe] were clean and used the latest versions of all of the drivers.'"

5 of 261 comments (clear)

  1. Wait and see by xming · · Score: 5, Informative

    As pointed out by Ars http://arstechnica.com/news.ars/post/20060307-6334 .html I think we should wait and see for the more objective benchmarks. Anyway 2006 will be a good year for CPUs

    1. Re:Wait and see by hattig · · Score: 5, Informative

      The K8 core is as similar to the K7 core as the conroe core is to a PIII core.

      I.e., at first glance there are similarities which can lead to the obvious thought that the K8 core is just a K7 core with memory controller, but actually they're completely revamped, overhauled, enhanced and redone.

      I agree that it is time for AMD to get a "K9" out of the door as the K8 as it is won't compete against Intel's offerings unless AMD somehow get 3.6GHz out of 65nm at launch (which is extremely unlikely). Of course, K8L will probably put AMD back into the lead in terms of floating point anyway, but integer is going to be very weak.

      Unless AMD is sandbagging - but that's a faint hope for even the most ardent AMD fanboy. I think they miscalculated Intel this time around.

      Which of AMD or Intel has the most fangirls?

  2. Re:The Conclusion by Kjella · · Score: 5, Informative

    by the time this new intel is out, AMD should already be well and truly released. probably also embedding themselves more in Dell's good books and taking more than 80% of the market. Intel are fighting the loosing battle.

    1) AMD has something like 20% of the processor market, including OEMs. They couldn't deliver 80% of the market in many years even if the market wanted it.
    2) AMD has no major process/architecture shifts between now and Conroe's release.
    3) The AMD chip was already overclocked (but then again, they may have gotten a golden sample from Intel).
    4) It's losing, not loosing.

    --
    Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
  3. Re:AMD Processor Model Unknown by iainl · · Score: 5, Informative

    The AMD was overclocked to the timings of the one that won't officially be released until June - unsurprisingly, AMD won't let them have a pre-production chip to demonstrate how their one is even faster.

    --
    "I Know You Are But What Am I?"
  4. Re:Shock news. by fitten · · Score: 5, Informative

    The things that AMD has said that they have are F, G, and H revisions of the K8 core (the core that the Athlon64, Turion, Sempron64s, and Opterons are based on) which, other than DDR2 support, not much more information is available. There is another revision called the K8L which will supposedly have 2x the FPU units for about a 50% gain in FPU performance. These will most likely be HPC blade Opterons or some such.

    DDR2-800 support, which is the known upgrade, basically adds bandwidth to a chip that isn't bandwidth starved as it is. Current speculation is that the new DDR2-800 Athlon64s will show up to a 10% performance increase on extreme bandwidth benchmarks (synthetics and HPC crunchers, for example).

    THe simple fact remains that intel needed to do these tests at all, side by side. That's an admission on their part that AMD is beating them and beating them hard.

    Intel has publicly stated (admitted) this already. This demo is to show that the chips they have planned for Q3'06 release (speculation is that they will be delivering machines based on it in July which is the very beginning of Q3, which is only 4 months away) perform well.

    By the way, if speculation is that machines will be selling in July, this would imply that the chips are in manufacturing even as we speak. This means that Apple is most likely to announce availability of the new Intel based Power Macs around this time, as well and the various benchmark sites to have their hands on 'pre-production' machines in two to three months tops. We'll be able to see the real story then.

    The only announced things from AMD even remotely in this time frame (specifically July and Q3'06) are the AM2 socket for DDR2-800 and a speed bump of the FX-62 to 2.8GHz (which is the equivalent of the overclocked part in the demo). Given that DDR2-800 is expected to be a 10% speed bump at most in most cases and that Conroe will be available at 3GHz (if not higher as rumored - 3.33GHz), I predict (a rather easy prediction to make) that AMD will be playing catch-up for once in the past few years.