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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."
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. This has forced Intel to drop the prices of netburst (read: P4) parts through the floor to keep moving them. Intel is selling many parts at a loss, and they have more price cuts (up to 60%) planned for the 23rd of July. Conroe is a great chip, but it currently has bad yeilds and will not make up a significant portion of Intel's shipped CPUs until the end of this year. At that point, Conroe based chips will be 20% of production; you can only imagine how many will be available on launch, a whole 6 months earlier than that. Intel has a killer chip on their hands, but it will be along time before Intel is able to ship enough of these to do much to the market. In the mean time, Intel will continue to sell their old tech at a loss to clear out inventory and try to keep AMD from making more marketshare gains... I don't think it is going to work.
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DDR2-800 is not generally available to the retail world. So the only benchmark that makes sense is this
...
AMD FX-62 sales volume: LOTS
Intel Core 2 Duo sales volume: Zero.
Not only that but how hard is it to go in the bios and make and AMD64 processor perform sub-optimally? Sure it's DDR400 but CL4-4-4-10, and you need the ECC scrubing turned on, disable the cache and
If Intel really wanted a benchmark they should ask AMD for engineering samples of next year's cores and they could pit them together.
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.
The problem with your anology is that the industry funding of global warming research is presenting a real and alternative approach to the problem of global warming. It is not that global warming isn't happening it is a matter of finding the core problem. To blame global warming simply on economic output and not investigating other contributing factors is just bad science. It amounts to blaming recent volcanic activity on the production of green house gasses. Before such wild accusations are made yoou need to produce credible science to support the statements. The global warming crowd hasn't done that at all, rahter they make scarry statements to get the public to continue their funding.
As to Intel. well it has been pretty obvious to me that they have had issues now for some time. It sort of reminds me of Apple when they where promoting the PPC. Lots of hot air and nothing to back it up. In this case though I think Intel realizes they are screwed if there isn't any substance to their claims. Frankly Intel would do well to get a 20% lead on AMD on a performance per watt rating. So yeah Intel has likely optimized the benchmarking in their favor, though I doubt to the extreme as rebuttal benchmarks will come real fast. I don't however see them being successful with totally hollow performance "leaks". There has to be some meat with the potatoes or they will have trouble recovering, Intel knows this.
As far as independant tests that is all well and good but I want to see data on released hardware. Even at 10 to 15 percent I'm not to sure I'd want to switch back to Intel. AMD is the company that had the foresight to give me and the world a cheap 64 bit environment, that works rather well. So unless I see compelling reasons to change I'm likely to stay with AMD. The one thing that could change my mind is Floating point and the performance increase it might offer realworld CAD. Getting good benchmarks for that sort of thing is very difficult and slow, by the time those sorts of benchmarks hit the street I suspect AMD will be offering increased performance anyways.
What Intel may have is more head room in this processor than AMD has currently. That is they may be able to ramp speeds very quickly. Yes the Mega Hurtz race may very well be back for a short visit. But first Intel has to show that they can actually produce the processor.
Interesting times ahead.
Dave
Funny that I've been watching AM2 carefully for the past month, and only agree on "less mature". AM2 is not faster by itself, but it does open the door to DDR2 memory. Which means Intel went out of their way to compare an AMD on DDR memory with an Intel chip on DDR2, when Intel could very easily have set up the "equivalent" AMD system on DDR2. When they deliberately don't match memory technologies, I'm suddenly very suspicious of Intel's benchmark.
My socket-AM2 system has been stable - except for Tomb Raider, which does seem buggy (and I'm blaming graphics drivers for that). nForce4 is a buggy chipset period, I don't see how that is any advantage at all.
I expect Intel to jump ahead with their Core design, and then AMD to make up much of the difference with K8L later this year. But on the server side, AMD is going to eat Intel's lunch for a long while yet.
A witty [sig] proves nothing. --Voltaire
For someone being so vehemently anti-FUD, what's with the $1500 figure for the FX62?
Seriously, if you want to make a point, don't make up numbers. Sheesh.
Whether true or not, your post comes across as very fanboyish too.
You should never take a manufacturer's claims about their product as fact. If separate, independent testing proves that the Intel offering is better than the AMD chips mentioned, then that's a different matter. In this case, the only information available is from Intel and those they chose, hence it is unlikely to be independent.
I haven't seen any 'independent' tests yet where the machines contained identical hardware besides the MB and CPU. With that said, the Core Duo looks like a winner, and it looks like Intel will have the performance crown for the first time in a few years.
It will be interesting to see how AMD's K8L part on 65NM will do, but that thing won't ship until next year.
Still, IMHO, Intel will never recover to its pre P4 glory days. Before the K8 chips became smash hits in the enterprise, NO ONE seriousely considered AMD for a business app. That mind share has shifted. AMD is now viewed as at least Intel's Equal in terms of performance and stability.
Your analogy with Microsoft is a bit flawed. MSFT was able to leverage its OS monopoly to crowd Netscape out. CPUs are Intel's cash cow. Intel can't give them away for free to crush AMD.
It's great to see Intel back in the game, it should drive down the prices of the high end desktop CPUs and force AMD to innovate more quickly. They've been napping for the past couple of years as well...
Jesus used to be my co-pilot, but we crashed in the mountains and I had to eat him.
Everyone here is constantly saying "Oh its an Intel system, built by an Intel team, vs. an AMD system, built by an Intel team... I'll trust the reviews when independant people get them."
If you looked a little you would see, that there are already lots of people with the Conroe in their hands. And it has shattered every PI, 3DMark, world record there is. We are talking about 10s 1M SuperPi runs, and if you know anything about that benchmark you will know that is absolutely crazy. Why not read some forums, like XtremeSystems or more specifically some benchmarking threads where the world record was broken on air w/ Conroe, but now its under LN2 for some other people (including coolaler) and is holding the world record.
Actually, the performance benefit of DDR2 with Athlons is far less than 60%. Less than 6% in most cases. Check out this little comparison.
I'm not an Intel fanboy or anything. I just think people need to be more objective. Intel won this round. Maybe AMD can make it up with K8L? Until then, however, I'm going to be buying myself a Core2 system.
Intel: 8086, 286, 386, 486, p5, p6/pii, piii, piv
AMD : 8086, 286, 386, 486, Am586, K6, K7, K8/Hammer
Comparing K8 to P4 makes sense. They're both eight generation. The P4 was Intels answer to K7 and the Hammer was AMDs answer to the P3. Comparing Conroe to K8 doesn't make sense because Conroe is a 9th generation part. It'd also make more sense once Conroe is readily available. I can go to a store and buy a 285 today. I can't say the same about Conroe. Wait till the 9th gen AMD processors are out if you want to make this comparison on a technical level [or wait until Conroes are in ready supply].
Tom
Someday, I'll have a real sig.