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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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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
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.