Intel's Conroe Resurfaces, Benchmarks Strong

MojoKid writes "Intel has been occasionally leaking performance results of their upcoming Core 2 Duo processor for the desktop, code named Conroe. At this years IDF select members of the press were allowed to get hands-on access to test systems for benchmarking. Now, coincident with this week's Computex show in Taiwan, Intel has seen fit to show us just what their soon to be released CPU can do, yet again. Select press members got together with Intel in New York city for another round of testing with Conroe. HotHardware has a performance showcase posted with scores from a Core 2 Duo E6700 machine and a 2.93GHz Core 2 Duo Extreme Edition X6800. The results, compared against the backdrop of an overclocked 2.8GHz Athlon 64 FX-60 system, look very impressive indeed for Intel."

Comments

Intel's a bit wierd now.

[Anonymous Coward]

Now that Intel has it's first non-technical CEO, all they can talk about is vaporware of furture unreleased chips, while Shares of Intel have fallen 33 percent since Otellini succeeded Craig Barrett in May last year. Should the board/shareholders really allow someone with a background like Otellini's to run a company like Intel? You see how well medieval studies people worked out at HP. IMHO they need to get the tech people back in charge at Intel if they want it to compete in a tech market. At least in the past they succesfully defended their market share with their *existing* products even when they were inferior. This new strategy of basically saying "don't by our current stuff because our roadmap is even nicer" could only come from a MBA.

On Intel built and Intel controlled boxes.

[Visaris]

These benchmarks were run on boxes that Intel built. Even the AMD box was built and configured by Intel. Trusting these benchmarks is abit like trusting a study funded by the oil industry claiming that global warming isn't real. There have been a good number of independant tests of the Conroe and these put the top of the line Conroe around 12% faster on average than a FX-62. The results from the Intel benchmarks show a much bigger performance delta, and to be quite honest, I don't trust them one bit. Somewhere around 15% is much more reasonable.

Re:On Intel built and Intel controlled boxes.

[TheRaven64]

One big difference likely came from the RAM. The AMD box had DDR400, while the Intel box had DDR2-800. DDR2 has a greater latency in terms of cycles than DDR, but when the DDR2 is twice the speed of the DDR then this disappears in absolute terms and you are left with the RAM in the Intel box having about the same latency, but twice the throughput.

Having said that, all of the benchmarks run were publicly available. There's nothing stopping you from configuring an AMD box yourself and seeing what numbers you get. In fact, I'm slightly surprised that the review site didn't do this.

Re:On Intel built and Intel controlled boxes.

[(H)elix1]

As long as they are comparing CPU's that are a going to be launching, I was wondering why they did not use an AMD AM2 CPU that uses the same DDR2 RAM. "Typical" DDR2 is not very fast, thus the current real world comparisons of the 939/AM2 CPU's don't give a huge boost to the latest CPU. If DDR2-800 was common, the change over makes a bit more sense - possibly just what AMD was thinking as well.

And yes - you can dog a machine by tweaking the BIOS. Our kit was in a final bakeoff with a competitor - the customer was re-imaging the OS between installs, but we were last to use the server. The customer tried to drop a test file on the machine using a floppy disk and found the floppy missing. Went into the BIOS and we noticed 'someone' had set every possible BIOS setting to a worst-case condition. Turns a fairly fast machine into something not so quick. Won the gig, but I have to wonder how often this happens.

Re:On Intel built and Intel controlled boxes.

[jiushao]

Unless the Opteron magically scales better than linear when going from 2.2GHz and 2.4GHz (both tested) to 2.6 GHz it is still way behind, not only on raw performance but also on power consumption and price/performance. The woodcrest is a CPU of the future yes, the future being less than two weeks from now.

Re:On Intel built and Intel controlled boxes.

[tomstdenis]

It's hard to tell, they randomly jump from 275 to 880 and back. First off, why didn't they just choose 285s? Failing that, why did they jump between 2 or 3 different AMD cores? Who knows if their results are even accurate.

On the crypto side, the results are hard to read. The graph shows more signatures/sec for AMD but the table lists otherwise. Even still, I find it hard to believe Intel has any lead on that market. AMD has a 5 cycle multiplier and three ALU pipes for bignum math [hint: this is my passion]. Unless Intel has a 3 cycle multiplier or faster L1 (doesn't look like it) it should clock in at about the same pace. Doing bignum mults/sqrs I routinely get an IPC of nearly two on my 885 box.

It could also be that the code in OpenSSL [or whatever they used for SSL] is not tuned well. My TFM math library beats OpenSSL on x86-64 and matches it on x86-32 [both intel/amd] and PPC32 platforms.

Eitheway, I'm not saying it's impossible for Intel to win out on some marks. I'm just questioning the validity of the test because they seem to use random collection of boxes. If they want to make a point they could just pit some 285s against it running more open tests. I'd rather see Intel win by merits alone and not questionable testing practices. If they *are* faster it gives more incentive for AMD to catch up next year.

As for your comment about scaling linearly... If the task fits in the cache, generally it's true. At least for crypto work. AES takes 260 cycles @2.6Ghz ... it takes 260 cycles at 2.2Ghz as well ...

Where things skew is on the memory. It takes more cycles at a higher clock rate to access system memory. Which means that you may get the same walltime performance but the cycles/operation can go up.

Tom

Re:Core 2 Extreme

[cnettel]

The difference is that there is no trivial way for an end-user to dispute those performance numbers. It's even out of reach for several hardware sites (and there are real differences between different production sets of the same panel). Compare this to CPU performance: ANYONE will be able to run these benchmarks in two months. Anyone can run them today on the AMD and NetBurst side to get reference data. If the Intel results differ a lot at actual release, hell will break loose and Intel would be really out of touch to think that they can succeed. Mainstream users won't care anyway, and the technical users would certainly disprove of the methods.

So, Intel could do this, but they are probably quite aware of the consequences.

Not even a Current AMD System

[Anonymous Coward]

Why did they benchmark it against a DDR1 socket 939 FX-60? Of course the memory performance is going to be slower, as will be a few other things. What about the AM2 FX-62 with some DDR2, that would be a more compareable benchmark. Not to mention that you can buy an AM2 processor and mainboard and have it in your living room right now, whereas this new Core2duo stuff is still way off in the distance. Intel must be very frightened of AMD if they need to drum up this much business right at the launch of AMD's AM2.

Do Intel choose which benchmarks are run?

[edxwelch]

With the previous Conroe benchmarks, Intel specified which benchmarks could be run. I wonder if this is also the case in this review, because noticable absent is the SYSmark benchmarks.
It is standard practice in biased tests to only include the benchmark where your product does well.

Unbiased review, isn't it?

[d.3.l.t.r.3.3]

Why to compare a new generation of CPUs against and overclocked setup of one of the current best chips? Why not taking the test against an AMD chip with a similar NATIVE clocking or, maybe, against a similar X2, since the core duo is a dual core chip? And once again, it's fair to compare two completely different architectures by the sound of their clocking? Nobody remembers the ruckus that Intel did when AMD introduced a better architecture that simply ate Pentiums at equal clocking? Just a pointless piece of hype.

Re:Osborne Effect

[zakath]

Intel is suffering from the Osborne Effect. They have hyped their new products (which are comming in July/August of 2006) so much that no one wants their current parts.

I don't think Intel is suffering from the Osborne Effect. People don't want their current products because the competition has a better offering. The only option Intel really has is to hype future products because it has become common knowledge that their current line up can't compete with AMD. The hype you're hearing is more of an effort to stop the exodus to AMD, it's yet to be seen if that will work.

Intel is selling many parts at a loss

...and you know this how? Are you privy to the details of Intel's cost/unit? Yes, they've cut prices but they may have had plenty of room to do so and still make money.

This is all silly

[modernbob]

90% of the PC's bought are sold to people who don't know the difference between Ghz and dual core. The hardware so far outstrips the software's ability to use it that it makes these comparisons kind of lame. I think both Intel and AMD need to shift to a new way to market themselves . With the exception of gamers and people that live tech no one really cares if the machine does something several milliseconds faster than something else. If they can write a letter and send email and the machine doesn't run painfully slow they are happy. Lets face it, this is where the vast majority of users of PC's are!