Slashdot Mirror
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."
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.
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.
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
You have a point about the Intel thing, there. Just like the response time on a monitor -- if the benchmarks come from the manufacturer, how valid can they truly be? Where are the stips?
Point is -- Core 2 Extreme has great specs but the map and the landscape are wholly different. Time will tell.
The dangers of knowledge trigger emotional distress in human beings.
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.
I am a viral sig. Please help me spread.
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.
Soon this clown will show up spouting all his anti-Intel pro-AMD rhetoric.
He makes the worst of the Mac, Linux or Microsoft fanboi's look a touch out of the ordinary.
Both the Woodcrest and Conroe have shown time and time again in INDEPENDENT testing, to be quite a bit faster than any of AMD's options. I've been testing a Dell 2950 with Woodcrest and it simply smokes the HP DL385 dual core setups time and time again in both SQL 2005 (mixed size transactions) and anything else I throw at it, most of the time by 30-40% real world numbers. Other testers have seen much the same.
Intel just pulled a Microsoft. Microsoft was caught napping by Netscape. Intel was caught napping by AMD. It won't happen again.
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.
I was at a talk a few months back by the chief architect on the NetBurst team, who has since left Intel. He had some quite interesting things to say. One was that the P3 and 4 were great fun to work on, because they were the last chips anyone was allowed to design where performance was the only constraint. Now, power usage is far more important, and it will continue to be so for quite some time (i.e. until we start using some as-yet-uninvented form of magic to make our chips). The other thing he said was that he expected the P4 to top out at about 5GHz. Management told everyone 10GHz, because they thought the engineers were being too cautious. Even he was surprised when it failed to even make 4GHz.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
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!
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.
Just a quick prediction: Intel will trump AMD by pushing the Conroe out. AMD will cut prices, so their chips fit nicely into the price/performance bracket that the market will allow them to sell at. Consumers win.
The speed freaks will buy Intel for performance, as it gives the absolute fastest. The people that want good performance at a price that doesn't bust the bank will probably buy AMD (and that's the way it used to be with AMD & Intel for quite a while).
Then, AMD will likely make modifications in their next architecture that speed their offering up past that available to Intel. And the speed freaks will buy AMD. Intel may, or may not put their chips in the 'bang for bucks' ladder, as they still have the name to leverage.
Then Intel will release another architecture, and so on. This is called competition. It's good. It makes sure that both sides don't do a Microsoft, and get the chance to turn the PC chip market into a monocultural wasteland, and have the market stagnate. Others entering the fray will also be good (how long until China get their own offerings out?).. A heterogenous system is more robust, and results in better product at the end (that's what happens when you get real competition).. That's what's happening in the chip market.
Really, the only thing to look at in the big picture is that the general public win. We get better prices for better tech. The speed crown of the day is a passing thing, for either side.
As long as I get good tech for a good price, I consider it a win. Whoever gives me that price, Intel or AMD.
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.